We filmed all of the short Togetherness on Tuesday evening. That was definitely an interesting experience. It was the first one man project I’ve done for a while and it was refreshing and frustrating. It’s always a bit overwhelming to take a project from writing it to editing it without a producer, cinematographer or anything like that but it also gives it a real personal feel. I think this came through in some of my cinematography. I focused on close ups, short depth of field and a very moody lighting. Read the rest of this entry »
So I’m nearly done capturing all the Phelps’ footage. There’s a lot of it. I figured I’d put some screencaps up from it. Click the “more” button below this paragraph to see the rest of this post. There’s some really offensive language on the signs they hold and I don’t want to surprise someone with that. So read on at your own risk. Read the rest of this entry »
Lake of Fire is a really bizarre documentary. It’s way too long (clocking in at 2.5 hours) and doesn’t seem to have much of a coherant focus. But within this the director has actually made a really interesting documentary. You see how heartfelt some Pro-life people can be and how horrible others can be (I.e. the people who try to kill abortion doctors or try to horrify/guilt/manipulate people out of abortions). It also show the same in the Pro-choice movement. It shows Pro-life Christians and pro-life atheists. Catholic Pro-choice and agnostic pro-choice. Read the rest of this entry »
Just got my Demo Reel done, feel free to give me feedback. This is my first attempt at this. This is my demo reel, an amalgamation of my various works. The music is “AFK” by Pinback. This will be updating as new projects get finished so check back occasionally.
Well, I’ve been going over the footage for the Phelps’ Documentary. It’s going to be difficult to scale this down into a short film (25+ hours of footage). I’m constantly surprised at how people acted during that whole thing. Right now I’m capturing a scene where a youth pastor along with his youth group nearly attacks the Phelps’ (they had to be held back by police officers). Even I, who have nothing to do with the Phelps’ and was just a guy with a camera filming them, had people throw bottles at me and threaten me with violence. It didn’t seem to matter to them who I was or what I believed (I made it clear I was diametrically opposed to the Phelps’ beliefs) they were just angry and wanted to take that anger out on someone. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, I’ve officially decided on a script for my live-action short for this semester. It’s run a bit late because I’ve hated everything I’ve written so far. But this is actually the intro scene for a feature length movie I wrote a while back. The overall script wasn’t very good, but I liked this scene a lot. Read the rest of this entry »
For this ad I helped film, edit, and do the SFX for various parts of it. The biggest focus I had was some of the SFX. I did all the lettering (and in one of the versions had parts of the lettering behind parts of the scene, though this was taken out because we legally couldn’t obscure the Comcast “C”). The board that says “Competition” in the background of the basketball players scene I put there, I had to track it by hand because of how the camera moved. I also helped replace the ads in the scene with the ice skater (though I only got that started before my internship ended). This was a fun project to work on because the people who worked for Asher (the agency handling the Comcast ad) were really nice and were fairly prepared for each shoot so it all went smoothly.
I’ve had been working on LesPsych for nearly two years before it was made. When it started I was doing it for a class and I was trying to one-man it. Unfortunately, I found out quickly how helpful it is to have a producer for a project as it quickly fell apart. On one of my major shoot dates I actually had all but one of my actors not show up (most slept in or forgot) and the one that did show up came 30 minutes late. At that point it was too late to do anything else so I completely rewrote the script right there and filmed the project “The Loneliness of Doubt.” A few years later I decided it was time to try to make the original again, this time with a crew of four people (myself, a producer, a cinematographer, and a grip). This started out as just a labor of love, though by the end of it both myself and my crew were able to get practicum credit for it. The budget was about $40 (spent on printing film and various other props) and the shooting was done over about four days (anywhere from 6-13 hour days). It was shot as a shoddy behind the scenes documentary, but don’t be fooled there was a lot of planning and effort gone into actualizing this film.
This is actually a sand animation. This animation was for my Animation I class and for the project we needed to animate with sand, charcoal or paint, other than that there wasn’t any specific guidelines. It’s done by putting sand on top of a light board and then moving it around in ways to make shapes in the light. This actually started out as something that was supposed to be really trippy but as the shapes began to form I liked what turned out a lot better. I’m still not sure how it turned into what it is now from what I planned it as, but it just kind of happened. It’s my only expirement with sand animation so far, though I hope to work with it a bit more in the future.
The class I did this for was my Intro. to Digital Media Arts class. The project was to make a short PSA with the subject of “Children are not…” My phrase was Children Are Not Collateral Damage, I had in mind what I’d been hearing from a lot of generals and the President’s men about Iraq and how the insane amount of civillians being killed was just collateral damage and that was okay. So I decided to do a cut-out puppet animation. It was actually a very simple animation since I tried to go for a very childlike style, very primative. However the hard part came from getting such a simple animation to look good. Especially with the special effects, the shaking, dust and flashing lights. It’s one of my more political works, I prefer to stay away from anything too political or too set in a time or place, but I felt this was a message that needs to be heard today…and we’ll probably have issues with collateral damage long into the future also.
We filmed all of the short Togetherness on Tuesday evening. That was definitely an interesting experience. It was the first one man project I’ve done for a while and it was refreshing and frustrating. It’s always a bit overwhelming to take a project from writing it to editing it without a producer, cinematographer or anything like that but it also gives it a real personal feel. I think this came through in some of my cinematography. I focused on close ups, short depth of field and a very moody lighting. Read the rest of this entry »