I am working on the Survivor audition tape. Actually, I WILL be working on it in about 10 minutes when I’m done typing away at this journal entry. So far just taping what we’ve done so far has been fun, and I can’t wait to see the finished product. Although I have some ideas for the intro… I still have no idea how it will come out in the end. I haven’t even picked any music for it yet, which is what seems natural for me to do first. I want some Jerry Bruckheimer (sp?) soundtrack music for the intro… that’s for sure. Maybe a dash of Con Air and a pinch of The Rock, with a sliver of National Treasure for good measure. (no pun intended, ha ha!) I guess I should go get to work on it then. It’s either that or I could complain about how much it sucks to wait for 2 more months until I can buy my VX2000 and accessories. Yes, sucks it does…
Archive for December, 2004
So one of the two weddings we were scheduled to shoot in April has canceled on us. Apparently the padrino thought we were charging too much, so they went off to hire some Photo y Video place that will charge half as much and will deliver a quarter of the quality… if that. So be it. Then, we finally got a date for the other wedding we are shooting, and it is the day before Lan’s wedding. So now he will not be shooting the reception of Alyssa’s wedding… I’ll have to handle that, along with the video, apparently… on my own. If she still wants us. The wedding promises to be grand, though… being at Crystal Cove and all. We’ll see what will happen on that front.
Then, there is someone at work who wants to hire us to shoot (photo and video) his daughter’s first birthday in January. He may also want me to edit some footage of his daughter’s birth (not the graphic stuff, but the before and after stuff). I guess we’ll find out if we are going to do that project or not within the next week.
This weekend, we are supposed to be shooting a Survivor audition video for a friend. That will definitely be fun. Then we have the work DVDs that will hopefully happen in February.
Hopefully things are going to pick up for White Mountain Studios. I want 2005 to be the year that WMS goes from a dream to reality… and then some. Now, with us picking up the video side… we should be full serviced enough to handle anything that comes our way.
The judging didn’t go as expected… because I won. Lan, Jarr and I had all put Lan’s video at the top of the list, but the viewers chose, and my video was their choice. It was interesting. Lan, Jarr and I judged our videos based on the level of difficulty, the attention to detail in the edits, the flow of the sequences… and the Wycoff family basically picked the one they liked the most, based on personal preference. I hadn’t really thought of that, and it’s something to keep in mind for the future. It’s like a super high tech bad ass car… if it’s ugly, then only techno-geeks will drive it… other people just won’t like it.
So we need a new project, and I think I may have an idea for it. It’ll be another pratice thing… and that’s what we need. I don’t think that Jarr will want to be involved, though. I had to pester him and bombard him with calls from both Lan and I all week to motivate him to do this project. I’m pretty sure he won’t care to be involved in the next. That’s ok though… the best part was watching the videos with everyone at Tony’s… everyone laughed and had a good time. That’s what it’s all about in the end I guess.
The Big Bear Snowshoeing 2004 Video Competition is being judged tonight at Tony’s house. Even though I think I already know the outcomes of the judgements… in fact I have posted a page with the results already in the new video section… we’ll see what will happen. I have also provided copies of Lan’s and Jarr’s videos. Judge them for yourself…
Lan’s (11MB)
Jarr’s (6MB)
Over Thanksgiving weekend Lan, Jarr and I went to Big Bear on a little snowshoeing trip. Lan and Jarr had just bought their snowshoes and wanted to try them out. We took our cameras as always… and we took the Canon ZR 25 camcorder… even though it is dying (the heads are dying and have a lot of trouble staying clean). We were shooting video just for fun, being our usual dumb selves… and about halfway through the trip… actually more like 3/4 of the way… Lan got the idea to have a video editing competition using the crappy footage we were shooting. We would all three have the same raw footage, and we could edit it any way we liked, adding any sound we wanted… and we had 2 weeks to do it. It was meant to motivate us to practice editing video. Well… we totally ignored the competition for over a week, then on Monday night I started to work on it, and after I showed Lan and Jarr my 23 seconds of edited footage with soundtrack… they started theirs. I have now finished my version, and though I am not really all that happy with it, it was my very first time using Adobe Premiere… and my first time editing video… and so I guess it could be much worse. In total I believe I spent about 5 hours on it. Half of that was spent reading the Premiere book and figuring out how to do what I wanted to do.
Here is my version of the video… Big Bear Video (14MB)
We are set to have a premiere of all three videos this Saturday at Tony’s house, and none of them will know whose is whose… and they will be judged. I am pretty sure that Lan will win. Not only does he have a considerable amount of experience with Premiere already, but he apparently took the project much more seriously than me and has spent a lot of time already… and is spending a lot more, from the looks of it. He took an entirely different approach from mine… and chose some really great music. Basically he did a better job. No worries, though, this project is going to spawn off a few more for us… and we are going to work towards a short film this summer… besides the corporate video projects we have planned… so I will have more than enough opporunity to show him up… if I can. I guess this will be the start of my video life… if all goes well. So now there’s photo and video. Guess I should take some photos and shoot some video. Yeah.
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