See the Firefall we did, and it was exceptional!

The video below is a 4K time lapse of the sun highlighting the falls in a fiery orange color.

For the full 34 minute version in real-time and 7K, enjoy this video.

And here is a GoPro timelapse of what it was like from our shooting location.

Jupiter and Saturn Getting Cozy. +Mars & the Moon! (20 Dec 2020)

Jupiter & Saturn Conjunction + the Moon in 4K (21 Dec 2020)

I just finished this promotional video for the ESL department at Las Positas College. I collaborated with Jonathan Brickman, the ESL department coordinator. He’s so enthusiastic and it was a pleasure working with him for this project. We met over a half-dozen times to work out all the details. I’m happy to say he’s extremely please with how the video turned out. Success!

If you know anyone who’s looking to improve their English, send them this video. Las Positas College has a great ESL program. For more info, visit: www.laspositascollege.edu/ESL/

This video is a collaboration with Timothy Hagerty and Austin Presley. We met during a casting call for musicians and artists for my Intermediate Videography class. Timothy plays the ukulele and played a new song he composed for me. I asked if he was interested in making a music video, and well, the video above is what we created.

Timothy and his good friend Austin (with his djembe) came over to my place to do some test shots. I’ve never shot a music video before, and they never played the song together. The testing was fun. It gave them a chance to practice together, and it gave me a chance practice testing my video gear.

A couple weeks later we heading out to Morgan Territory, a regional preserve just north of Livermore, CA. We spent a couple hours filming at least ten different takes in different areas of the park.

Since recording audio on the field wouldn’t sound good enough for the music video, they recorded a clean “studio” version later on. This is what I used for the video above.

Lesson #1 for music videos: Get the exact audio file of the song before anything. The problem was that the version they played while recording was different than they recorded later on in the studio. Granted, they had more practice and the new version sounded awesome. But, man, it was almost impossible to get it to match the video clips. I think I did alright. Did you notice?

For the next music video, I’m going to be sure to get their recording for filming and play it on ghetto blaster. That way they will be playing the exact version of the song that I’ll use in the video.

We had a great time working together and Timothy is interested in doing another video. I can’t wait to see what we come up with next.

There are two things that I’ve always wanted to do: a time-lapse video and a tour of all the big Silicon Valley companies. This video is what I came up with for the final project for my Intro to Videography class,

This shoot took place over two days with about 8 hours of driving each day over a distance of 200 miles. My wife Andrea drove while I shot the video. I took footage with my DSLR while the GoPro mounted on top of my truck captured the time-lapse. Of course we brought J.T. our mascot with us too.

Here was our planned route. I had planned to complete the loop from Livermore to Livermore, but we only got as far as Treasure Island as the sun set on the second evening.

This trip was really fun and we got to tour by the most famous tech companies in the world. With over 15 hours of GoPro footage, it was a quite challenge to keep it short. Originally I wanted to keep it to the length of one song, but I split it to two, one for each day of driving.

At each stop, we started walking J.T. in front of the famous signs. Later the first day I realized that I should have made J.T. the central focus of the video. By then it was too late, but it really would have been cool to have the movie called: “J.T. the Dog Who Toured Silicon Valley.” But I’ll use that as a nugget of wisdom for another day.

In class, we dabbled a little bit into using keyframes and motion. So I experimented with that as you see with the logos in the video. I really wanted to add a moving map showing our location, but I ran out of time. I also learned that it’s important to check camera settings. Since I was also taking a photo lighting class this semester, I didn’t realize that my white balance was still set to flash until we reached Intel headquarters. I didn’t have much luck fixing it in post-production, so that why my early DSLR footage is a little blue.

This was a great assignment and I really learned a lot with this project. Now that I’m done with my Intro to Videography class, I really wish this was something I had gotten into earlier. I really like it. A lot!