Here’s another beautiful piece of work by Sean Dunne. I hope you enjoy it.
http://www.vimeo.com/5966300blog
RePost: “Them Crooked Photo Contracts”
Why are bands trying to take away the rights of photographers?
Daniel Boud has an interesting post on his site about bands vs. photographers. You can read it here:
http://www.boudist.com/archive/2009/11/22/them-crooked-photo-contracts.php
Showcase: “What is That”
I like how the old man gets the one-up on his son. This is beautiful. The CG bird could’ve been a bit better, but all-in-all, this a very nice.
Showcase: The Archive
Here’s a beautiful short film by Sean Dunne. It’s called “The Archive”. Paul Mawhinney is a man who’s devoted his entire life to music. In fact, he has the largest record collection in the world, estimated to be worth over $50 million.
The coloring is superb and I love the minimalistic camera shots. Most of them are steady, but there are some great pans and glides too.
I wish I had $3 million to buy The Archive.
Melinda + Jason // Save the Date
http://www.vimeo.com/7425918
Melinda came to me to have me do a film of their wedding. She has a website for the wedding and I thought it would be fun to make a “Save the Date” video for her & Jason.
This is a short story of how they met. I asked Melinda what song she would like for the video. “January Wedding” seems to fits perfectly with the theme, but it’s also such a great song.
The day shots were done in the Ghent area of Norfolk, VA. I did the interview shots outside of the studio at night. I love the sound of the crickets and the holly tree as a backdrop.
The footage was shot on my HV40 with Jag35Pro and 50mm ƒ1.8 lens. I used a single overhead light to get that nice deep contrast on their faces. My Sennheiser MKH416 saved the night… there was so much noise going on around us – a football game at the stadium nearby with an announcer over the loudspeaker, jet planes, trucks, frogs – I thought most of the audio would be ruined. I was going to filter out the crickets, but it gives the film such a nice feel.
I wish Melinda & Jason the best in their relationship and look forward to shooting their wedding film.
—
Song: “January Wedding” by Avett Brothers
7 Cities Ballroom – Dance Showcase // Event Demo
This is the latest project I’ve been working on. It’s for a group called 7 Cities Ballroom. It was their annual dance showcase. They like to take a video of the event for the students, for which they usually just stick a camera on a tripod. This time around they decided to go professional on the video. I, too, stuck a camera on a tripod, but I also went handheld/low tripod to get some great cut shots.
I had an HV30 with a wide-angle lens on a tripod (thanks Jacobi!), on a table to try to shoot over the table that was right up to the dance floor. The distance from the wall to the dance floor was shallow, so it cut off a bit of the sides. The second camera was my HV40 with 35mm adaptor & Canon 50mm f1.8.
Most of the dancers were instructor or students. However, there was a couple from Kansas City, Lila & Michael Shultz, that blew the night away! They are pro-level dancers and it was really cool to watch them perform. This is just one performance out of the hour-long event.
Enjoy.
Showcase: Reverie
This is such beautiful camera work. Vincent Laforet got ahold of a 5DmkII and went at it. He uses a few different techniques in shooting and post to make everything look so alive. I love it!
7 Cities Ballroom – Dance Showcase // Event Demo (pre-production)
The latest project I’m working on is for a group called 7 Cities Ballroom. It was their annual dance showcase. They like to take a video of the event for the students, for which they usually just stick a camera on a tripod. This time around they decided to go professional on the video. I, too, stuck a camera on a tripod, but I also went handheld/low tripod to get some great cut shots. It really made the video interesting.
I had an HV30 with a wide-angle lens on a tripod (thanks Jacobi!), on a table to try to shoot over the table that was right up to the dance floor. This was no good because you could see people’s heads in a lot of the shots. Also, the distance to the floor was short so the closest corners of the dance floor were cut off. When the dancers went to those corners I tried to cut to the other camera when I could. I tell you though, they were fast on their feet and I couldn’t always keep up.
The second camera was my HV40 with 35mm adaptor & Canon 50mm f1.8. I varied the shots between steadicam and low tripod. I tried to keep it a bit artistic so I could really make it interesting in post.
What you see below are stills from the HV40 (click them to see the full size). These are final production stills (Final Cut is crunching a hour of HD footage as I type… for the past 8 hours). I may post a few of the dances later on, or maybe make a montage of the night for your viewing pleasure.
Most of the dancers were instructor or students. However, there was a couple from Kansas City, Lila & Michael Shultz (the first image), that blew the night away! They are pro-level dancers and it was really cool to watch them perform, though difficult to keep up with the camera.
Enjoy.
Here’s a glimpse of the FCP timeline… lots of syncing of tracks and audio.
Search Engine Optimization is Crap
Most of my conversations with people who want more hits on their website and want their site at the top of Google searches usually have a duped mentality. Back in the days when the interwebs was new and mostly broken, search engine optimization was somewhat legitimate. I remember having a folder of bookmarks to an admin page on most of the popular search engines so I could submit mine and my clients sites on a regular basis to “bump up” the results.
That never really worked.
Some say that blogs are passe. HA!… funny little man. Blogs became really big about decade ago. As time went on, other forms of personal & professional content became easier to share via podcasts, video podcasts, youtube, etc. But none of that replaced the good ol’ blog. That’s like saying that movies replaced books. Blogs are here to stay, so get used to it. And if you want your site to be seen, the best thing to do is create content for it continuously so that search engines can pick it up.
Now, audio and video is great, but a robot can’t scan those files for anything useful; they need words. That’s right, words. So, go ahead and post your images, videos, podcast, whatever. But remember that it doesn’t end there. You need to write something useful about it.
A robot isn’t going to watch your video and find information from it that it can relay to the internet (e.g. “Wow, look how hard that kid hit his dad in the nuts with the bat!”). Nope, you need to tell that robot what it is looking at. Remember, searches are still performed with text (words!).
You, like myself, may not be a good writer. But it’s not so much how well you write, but that you do write something… accurate. Get your content out there. Get a blog. Be active and you will see those results over time.
Read this: “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” by Derek Powazek
The Power of No Reward
Here’s a great article about not paying referral fees to your friends/colleagues:
