My friends at Dead Panda Comedy had a great idea. They got in touch with me last month about DPing their latest video, a crazy one-take steadicam tracking-shot music video parody with a ton of extras and VFX. They had been told that it was impossible. Together we worked out the details and planned a very possible shoot. Somewhere in Jersey on a cold Saturday morning, we began hammering out take after take until we finally got what we needed in the late afternoon. Then it went into post for 2.5 weeks and was released on YouTube on Tuesday. Since then it’s been featured on College Humor and Smosh and it’s starting to rack up views on YouTube. Exciting stuff!!!
I served as gaffer, DP, Glidecam operator, VFX coordinator, and editor. So basically I facilitated bringing their vision to YouTube. But the real creative push came from the guys at Dead Panda. Their “impossible” idea and a ton of time procuring the resources they needed, plus the awesome writing and acting was what made this video great. Plus they had some really awesome sound work by some guy named Nick.
In the next few days they’re planning on launching a behind-the-scenes campaign. Once they do I’ll post some detailed info on how we managed to shoot this in one take, how I lit the basement despite it not having electrical outlets, how I removed crew/equipment in the frame in post, and how I composited and rotoscoped the rainbow, portrait, and computer pullback.
In the meantime, watch the video and share it with your friends! Let’s get it to a billion views! A Billion Views.
I had been planning to do this since I started designing my website and I finally got it working properly. The videos on my website now display their associated comments and statistics from YouTube via the YouTube API. What does this mean for you? Well, explore the Film section and you’ll see just how cool this feature is.
Right now you’ll have to click the link to go to YouTube in order to rate/comment my videos, but not for long! Next on my To Do List is to build all of that functionality into my website. Using your YouTube username and password, you’ll be able to comment, rate, favorite, playlist to your heart’s content – without ever leaving this site. Also keeping me busy is the gallery, which has entered the realm of eCommerce! You can now purchase prints of my photography and artwork directly from my site through PayPal. Tons of other sweet stuff is on the way too, check back soon.
If you visited my site in the past day or so you probably noticed this frantic message:
Woah! Something got seriously screwed up with my photo/art gallery. I’m REALLY hoping it’s just some server maintenance. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Every page of the gallery and anything that parsed content from it was dead – 500 Internal Server Error. It turns out the problem was a corrupted .htaccess file in the gallery root. At any rate, it’s working stupendously again so give it a visit. Now I can sleep tonight…
Over the past week, I shot a short public service announcement about the negative consequences of underage drinking for a local contest. Check it out in the Film section.
There’s a ton of features and uploads on my to do list, but I’ve been swamped with work. I have a backlog of photos to edit and publish to my gallery so look for a huge boost to the photo section this week. Some other things I’m working on:
Audio content with an embedded MP3 player
An improved video section that parses comments and ratings from YouTube
More videos, especially older ones
A WordPress blog
A full biography
So sit tight, I’ll try to have this all accomplished within a few weeks.
This one has been in development for a while. The Film page finally has some content – Axiom, a short film I made. It’s wrapped in a new video player that I’m hoping to continue using on the rest of my site. It streams videos from YouTube so I don’t have to host them here. Now that I have something that works, I’ll keep building in new functionality and add some more videos. Check it out!
Check out the new gallery, hot off the press. Here you’ll find sections for photography and artwork. The cool features include comments, rating, geotagging, RSS feeds, and more. Be sure to sign up by clicking “Register” on the top right to gain access some upcoming features.
NOTE: There’s an issue with the Sendmail program on my server which means that gallery email features will not function properly. I’m resolving this ASAP.