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.
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.
In February I received an e-mail asking if my video production company in Olympia did “video biographies.” At that point, I hadn’t, but I was very excited by the opportunity to try something new. Wedding videos and web commercials are great, don’t get me wrong, but I’m always wanting to branch out and experience different things, broaden my range, expand my portfolio, and learn. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity. So I was candid, and replied that I had not done any, but would be eager to give it a shot. I recommended another company that I know specializes in such things if the client didn’t want to take a risk with a type of project I had not done before. I offered a fair price and waited.
She got back to me and had decided she’d like me to do the video biography for her mother, who was soon to be turning 80. The video biography would be shown at her birthday party, and copies given out to the guests. Here is about an 8 minute excerpt from the video.
I was very happy with the finished product. Quite pleased. The project in it’s entirety was a pleasure to work on. The shoot was fun, it was nice listening to Iona’s stories, and as usual, by the time I was done editing, I felt I knew Iona really well.
After everything was said and done, I found that Tammy, (Iona’s daughter) and Iona had left a great review on a vendor listing site I utilize.
“I hired Ken, at Kinetic Vision Media, to do a video biography of my mom for her 80th birthday. He was extremely patient with her, respectful throughtout the process, and we couldn’t be happier with our end product. I showed the DVD at her birthday party and I had 43 people agree with me that the DVD was amazing. I gave Ken some photos and my mom’s favorite music at our shooting and he implemented them and added so much richness in the creative way he put them and his own ideas all together. He allowed us to do some final editing to make it exactly to our liking and he met our deadline without a problem. I found Ken easy to work with and extremely flexible to our schedule. Prior to hiring Ken, I did much research within a reasonable distance to view the industry standards and try to decide how I wanted this to turn out. Ken offerred his own ideas and assisted us with coming up with a wonderful product and copies that we were able to distribute to our family members as a life-long momento. His pricing is extremely fair and lower than many other places around. Very good value all around. We would recommend Kinetic Vision Media without hesitation and hope many people read this and hire him so they can be as happy as we are with Ken’s work.”
Thanks Tammy and Iona!
So I’m hoping to launch a redesigned website soon, and plan on having a section featuring info and pricing on these types of videos, which I hope to be doing more of in the future. Thanks for reading!
These yellowbook shoots! I sure do seem to do a lot of them! For anybody who hasn’t seen these on my blog before; I contract with a production company to shoot these 30-60 second web commercials for yellowbook.com. They’re a lot of fun, I enjoy doing them, they keep me very busy, and they’ve certainly expanded my portfolio! Even though I can’t actually embed the videos on my site, I can post links to the videos, which I recommend watching, as I’m fairly proud of each piece I’ve shot.
I’ve noticed recently that yellowbook has changed their embedded flash video player. The new video player seems to be quite glitchy, which is unfortunate, as the videos don’t look as smooth as they could while watching…
Auburn Muffler Brake and Radiator an automotive shop in Auburn (as the name clearly establishes!). This was shot in October, but only within the past few weeks did it make it up. I have no idea why! I don’t edit these, I just shoot them and send the tapes to LA for post.
D&D Recycling These guys don’t have anything to do with recycling old role-playing books. It’s mostly metal. Not the kind of metal you’d listen to while playing D&D… Interesting, this video was shot the same day as the Seattle Movers video, but this one didn’t post until a month later!
Others are in the pipes! A video shot in December has yet to be posted, I’ll be glad to see it when it does. 6 additional videos have been shot in the last 2 months, and I’m shooting one tomorrow. As much as the economy seems to be flailing, I get the impression the little guys are doing all the heavy lifting! These small businesses all seem to be doing well, and they’re keeping me busy. Thanks for reading!
Every morning my alarm clock goes off, waking me to the sound of Dave Ross’s voice on KIRO news radio. There have been times when I think I should change the station. It seems like every day I wake up to his voice rattling off the number of jobs that were lost that in the days before. I hear him talking about the stock market losses and the overall impression I’m left with is that things are not looking up. It’s depressing. Sometimes I think I should change the radio station.
It’s terrible to know that things are getting as bad as I hear they are. That’s just it though; I hear. Having not experienced any of this downturn personally, I consider myself very fortunate. In October, when it was big news, I remember hearing talk of it everywhere I went, never saw it though. My schedule in October was busier than it had ever been. Yellowbook shoots, the Sweet Adelines concert, and none of it showed any signs of slowing down. I even booked a wedding for November, something unprecedented for me. As bad as I heard things were getting, I still didn’t see it.
Toward the end of November and the beginning of December things slowed down. The Yellowbook shoots fizzled to non-existence. Weddings stopped. There were no gigs forthcoming. I was fine with that because I was prepared for the reality that November through March are my slowest months. Before December was out, I had booked two more weddings. January enters, and 2009 is upon us. I’m taking it slow, starting to crunch my numbers for taxes. I purchased my first print advertisement in The Olympian’s Bridal guide. With one purchase, ’09′s advertising budget had already surpassed ’08′s.
Going in to February, I’m getting e-mails and calls about doing weddings and other gigs. The yellowbook shoots came back; with a vengeance. All in one week! Things are seriously blowing up.
I know that economic downturns are a chance for new and innovative ideas to really make their marks, and I feel like I have some of this within that I want to bring to the table. Trouble is, what I thought was going to be a slow time is turning out to be much busier than anticipated. There are interesting new methods I’ve wanted to implement in my marketing strategy, along with updating my website. Apparently the time I was looking forward to resting on my laurels has come and gone.
Why? Quality? Pricing? I think both. The work I offer is on qualitative par with people charging double what I charge. I didn’t drop my prices for the depression, they’ve been set since spring ’08. I think my quality will show, and my prices will win major points. Because I’m not doing this out of greed. I’m not trying to pay off a Cadillac Escalade, or a similarly ridiculously large and overpriced house. I’m doing this because it’s really what I want to do.
