From July 2010 – Ocean Shores 50th Anniversary just happened to coincide with the anniversary of the United States. The celebration was, how do you say – “Off the hook?” Working with a production company out of Ocean Shores I wandered around for a few hours and collected some footage of the festivities. The best part? I had the pleasure of cutting the video to the excellent music and a delightful performance of Ericka Corban.
Isn’t she rad? Go to her website! Buy her records and see her live!
How many independent filmmakers or indie film teams are there in Olympia? Video production has always been a tool with which I engage my true passion – storytelling. I’ve used other tools, mediums, and enjoyed them all. The camera is my favorite. Telling stories is the reason I picked it up, and it’s what I want to use it for. In a professional capacity, the stories being told are the passion of local businesses for the service they provide. Or the culminating of the love two people have for each other on their wedding day. The story of an elder recounting their life’s history, the lessons they’ve learned, and people met on their journey. These types of stories can be fun and engaging, but the true passion, the one that called me to pick up a camera decades ago, can only be fulfilled by the crafting of independent narrative filmmaking. With the goal of narrative filmmaking in mind, several cohorts and I created what amounted to a screenwriting club in spring of 2009. We called it Mutually Assured Productions. We met weekly, and wrote dozens of scripts, waiting for the right one that struck us enough that we’d like to make a movie out of it. After months of writing, we set a deadline; we had to pick a script to move in to production with by June. June came. We picked one, and we moved forward. After much planning and preparation, flirting with abandoning the whole project to budgetary concerns, we finally started shooting in September of 2009. Trying to coordinate the free time of a few dozen working people and come out with a working schedule to make a film can be a difficult task. By mid October 2009, we were done shooting. Post production began. In early February 2010 The Van Job was finished.
We rented out downtown Olympia’s historic Capitol Theater and premiered our short film to an amazingly supportive audience of 200+ (by our humble estimates). We brought dozens of copies on DVD, and sold them all in minutes before the show. We took a Q&A session afterward, and partied it up the rest of the day. Our whole team was riding a euphoric high of positivity. From inception to completion and premiere, we had created our own movie. People had come to see it in a real theater. What was next? We started writing again, eager to capture some of that fire in our bellies and make another one. Which we did, and then some. More on that later.
Here are some fun links about The Van Job -
An article about The Van Job from Olympia Power and Light The Van Job on IMDB – The Internet Movie Database
An awesome review from a fellow Olympian – twoplayercoop.com
A poster for The Van Job -
Okay. Trying to finish up 2009. A few more wedding videos in Olympia, Seattle, Tacoma and outlying areas. Then I moved on to some other really cool projects.
Toward the tail end of summer ’09, I was the wedding videographer for Amber and Justin’s wedding. The wedding was at a beautiful historic house in the Sumner area, and it could not have been a more beautiful day. Here is the Highlight Reel from the wedding.
I did the videography on a couple more weddings that year, but I think it’s about time to move this blog on to what I consider to be my single most monumental achievement of 2009. Next blog – Mutually Assured Productions and The Van Job.
I like to take a break from commercial video production in Olympia and pursue some purely creative ventures once in a while. After purchasing Panasonic’s HMC-150 last year, I decided to film the sun rise on the longest day of the year. I trekked up to the top of Tumwater hill and shot the longest sunrise of the year. I did some time-lapse with it, sped it up, and I think it looks really cool! Enjoy!
Okay, it’s been well over a year since I’ve written on the blog here. So I’m going to start way back when I stopped updating it, and spend the next few weeks covering everything I missed; bringing it up to date. Sometimes this commercial and wedding video production gig here in Olympia, Seattle, and Tacoma keeps me so busy I don’t always have time to update. Wow, what an understatement!
Starting with Jasmin and Louis. June 27th, 2009. Jasmin and Louis booked early, which is great. Their wedding was at St. Ignacio’s Chapel, which is on the campus of Seattle City U. Beautiful church, really amazing. I loved shooting there, and would love to do it again. The architect of the church described the theme of his design as “7 bottles of light.” It’s really pretty.
Jasmin and Louis’s wedding was the first opportunity I had to utilize the camera I had just purchased; Panasonic’s HMC-150 AVCCAM. This is an HD camera that takes advantage of a relatively new video compression coded called AVCHD. After many months of researching, this was the HD camera I decided to buy. Panasonic had earned my loyalty years before with their DVX-100 line of cameras. Although the final product went out in standard definition, the HD stuff looks far superior, even on a DVD.
Anyway, here’s a couple of video clips from Jasmin and Louis’s wedding! The first clip is the pre-ceremony montage. This was shot exclusively with the HMC-150.
Next is the post-ceremony montage. This portion was shot with a combination of the DVX and HMC. You can actually see the difference between the two cameras when it switches. This is primarily due to adjusting the aspect ratio of the two cameras to match up properly.
