Battle Of The Bands at UVU

This Tuesday is the battle of the bands at UVU produced by a friend and senior student Brian Parsons, with help from the Audio and Cinema Clubs on campus.  It is going to be a huge and fun event for sure.  We already have tons of sponsors and 13 bands that will be performing.  The Audio and Cinema Clubs will be taking care of the event sound wise and also for video taping and making a DVD later on.

The video team will be intensive, 21 people including myself are on the call sheet.  My role is DIT, known as the data wrangler, I will be copying files all night as they come to me.  There will be some challenges as I expect 4 camera cards to get me at once, and they will be SD cards being transferred with the oh so fast USB2.0 protocol.  Plus there will other cameras shooting CF cards, an Atomos Ninja and some KiPros, so we’ll have to see how it goes.  I will be setting up a mac based DIT station tomorrow with one of the professors and maybe we’ll see if my HacPro can see some action.  I finally got it not too freeze when new drives are plugged in.

 

Thanksgiving, a time for reflection

Well, here in America we are heading into the holiday season starting with Thanksgiving in a couple days.  As always people tend to reflect on what they are grateful for, and some might even get a head start on planning their new years resolution.  I have seen many friends on Facebook do countdowns of gratitude.  And all around have seen great things in people wanting to help others.  It truly is a great season.

There are a couple things I am grateful for as well.  Teachers that have taught me skills that I can apply in work, for showing me how to find opportunities, and for the opportunities that have shown up as well.  These are actually quite numerous so I won’t post all of them here.  But one of the opportunities I am most grateful is to help on is a senior project that will help out a place I hold dear.  I have already said I help out with a nonprofit called Help Cape Verde Africa, but a group from my school is going to help out with our efforts.  And since we will be able to help more families and have better outreach to improve conditions, that makes me happy.  And I get to take some awesome footage for some projects of my own.

Check out the fundraiser here http://www.indiegogo.com/african-gardens

And a facebook event is here http://www.facebook.com/events/297610703688957

IndieGoGo Campaigning

So right now I am in the middle of an IndieGoGo campaign, and man is it tough and easy to get a little discouraged.  But never fear, it is still in the beginning of the campaign, only four days have gone by.  For those who want to know what it is, it is a fundraiser to help the NPO Help Cape Verde Africa to teach african families how to grow a garden in urban conditions. It is a great project and worth anyone’s time and effort, cause it not only helps educate african families, but this project we have students from UVU who will be helping us and contributions help them to develop their talents.

So far we have had over 200 people look at the campaign, today we reached $200 in which was put there by a seventh funder. What makes it kind of discouraging is knowing that if everyone who had saw the campaign gave $5 we would be over a quarter of the way to our goal.  I know times are tough and not everyone is in a position to give, and it could be the case that people want to give but need to wait until payday.  It is that kind of optimism that someone needs to do these things.  And I am confident that we can get there, we have 36 days left and are campaigning with the student group from UVU.

Wish me luck and please find a little to give, a little goes a long way in helping these families improve their nutrition and finances.

Stock Producer

During the summer I did a few things that were pretty cool.  First was I took an Avid training course and passed with flying colors.  So now I am an Avid Certified Editor.  Really awesome, and that led to another opportunity.  A local media company has recently acquired the domain name for stockfootage.com and was looking for people they could train to produce and polish assets for them.  They held a cooperative agreement with UVU and was able to train in a room at the college.  They only accepted 14 people, of which I was one of them.

It was a really great training and I learned a lot of valuable things, but I’m under an NDA and can’t you about them.  Not to worry though as I have also become a stock producer for them.  Things we learned were workflow, after effects procedures, editing procedures, time remapping, cameras, and whole bunch of other information.

Below is a demo reel I edited for them, it is slow motion, shot on the phantom camera, and I assisted in the creation of 8 clips that you will see in it.

Journalism School at Columbia Finishes First Year Shooting on DSLRs

This came out on DSLR News Shooter not too long ago.  This is actually quite refreshing to see, young journalists getting to shoot on small cameras that put out an amazing picture.  The basic kit consisted of a T2i, 17-40 mm lens, an audio recorder and a Røde NTG-2 shotgun mic. I have some of that myself, minus the L series lens and shotgun mic, but I plan on getting a shotgun mic pretty soon, that should complement my H4n pretty nicely.

After spending some time in the program the students were able to put out beautiful stories.  Here’s one of them

Bravo guys, well done.

Sustainable Agriculture Experiment

Have you ever grown food? Or are you one that thinks that milk, eggs and veggies come from the store?  There is more to that, everything you eat had to be grown somewhere, and it all comes from a farm(mostly).

So what if you wanted to grow things yourself? Good question, and here in the United States the resources are there to help you.  But what if you don’t live in the US.  That is what I’m trying to figure out is how to effectively use the resources at hand for use in Cape Verde for a humanitarian project.  So this might seem daunting but it shouldn’t really be that hard.  I already know that I will have mixed results, it’s just a matter of finding what works.

I will be using the sub-irrigation planter (SIP) method constructed of two buckets.  What works is a mixture whose main ingredient is either peat moss or cocopeat.  What doesn’t work is regular soil because the soil doesn’t absorb the water upwards so I need to find a way around that.  For the experiment I will have two SIP’s one peat moss based, the other cocopeat based, and 4 more SIP’s with regular soil each with a different wicking medium to draw the water upwards to the roots.

What an SIP looks like

The peat moss and cocopeat have already been documented to work, the reason I’m doing this experiment is because cocopeat and peat moss are not readily available in Cape Verde and I want to help the people there grow food in the soil they have.  Right now it’s very difficult since only 11% of the land is farmable because it’s so dry.

Along this journey I’ll be documenting and putting up some videos of how all this is going.  So please wish me luck.  And if you wish to support Cape Verde consider making a donation to this linked charitable organization.

No Need To Go To Video School

Actually going to school is still a good idea, there a person learns and experiences what they need to do to make a high quality video.  But what about those of us that don’t have the cash to do so?

The internet really is a wonderful place and one can learn lots from it.  Video sharing sites like YouTube has tutorials on everything video related you can think of, from screenwriting to camera work to post-production editing.  These kinds of developments really help to democratize the video world and allow ordinary people like you and me to tell their story.

One really good tool to help that is pretty recent is from the video sharing Vimeo, they have compiled clips and wrote lessons to help the common videographer in their endeavors.  They have created the Vimeo Video School.  Lessons are updated pretty regularly, usually about every week and cover lots of different topics.  Just checking it out will help in some way, and it’s always good to get back to the basics.  Here’s a taste on how to do a timelapse.

And here’s an example of a slow motion clip.

Can’t you just feel the creative juices flowing?