Here I made a cool little “ranchera” style music video for Guatemalan singer\songwriter Connie Pineda. It’s called La Grandeza de Dios which means the greatness of God. We decided to film everything outdoors to give the video that out in nature type feel. This was filmed out in Silverado Canyon on a Sunday and we had the video posted up to Youtube and Facebook by Thursday.
We initially had a concept to do this video very effects-heavy with green screen tricks and creative transitions but decided we wanted to make it look more organic and take advantage of how green everything looked that day.
Here is the video I made for Justin Flores. It’s a mashup of two songs: From afar by Vance Joy, and So Long, Honey by Caamp. We filmed it over two days. One day in the studio and the other day at Silverado Canyon here in Orange County, California. The audio and all the outdoor scenes were recorded on a Samsung Galaxy cellphone. Most of the B-roll was shot by Justin on his gopro camera. I used the Canon XC10 to film the studio scenes. It was a lot of fun working on this project. Enjoy!
So here’s a cool little video slideshow I made to recap the year for the non-profit group Tough Women Only, an organization’s with a mission to unite, empower, and inspire women.
This was another new learning experience for me as I had never used these effects and techniques before. The last slideshow I made was a bit more plain-looking as it was on a flat black background. I also didn’t scale those pictures up to fill the entire frame. The main transition I used on that last slideshow was the cross – dissolve. This time I around, I placed the pictures in order on the timeline, scaled them up really big and added a gaussian blur. Then on another layer I added the same pictures again and used keyframes to make them scale up from a much smaller size than the frame. I also used keyframes to mess with the rotation. I also used the Basic 3D effect to add swivel and tilt keyframes to the pictures. Lastly, I used the slide transition which was pretty cool because it allows you to mix up the directions in which the next slide appears into the frame. Basically, I wanted there to be a lot of movement in this video. I used a song called “Morning Chill” by Adi Levi which I thought really captured the mood of the video. Anyways, without further ado…. Here’s the video
My first ever horror film short (first ever film short, actually) : Caught in the Spider’s Web. There were a lot of learnings in this one. All the special effects seen in this film where first-times for me so I had to learn them from scratch. I shot the whole thing in manual mode- no auto settings & no auto focus. I did set up a few lights but tried to shoot most of it with natural light coming through the windows, adjusted my aperture, and used the curtains to direct the light where I wanted it to go. I wasn’t afraid of shooting too dark because it is a horror film. I wanted the lights to come in at sharp angles. I’m pretty proud of how this came out and I’m sure that my future projects will keep on getting better and better.
Here’s a video I made for my good friends over at Tough Women Only. I used the inspirational quote from their website as the outline for the video and then used their pictures to tell that story. Back it up with an inspirational song and we have ourselves a cool video.
Here’s another one I shot all in slow motion and using the spider steady stabilizer. I didn’t have shot list or story in mind. I just shot a bunch of footage and then I found a song that would go good with it and cut the video to the music. I learned one thing as a director though and that’s the fact that I need to make sure I direct. I didn’t tell my actress anything other than to walk around and I would follow her. However, I learned that to get better footage, I really need to be directing and telling the actors what it is I want to see and what shot I’m trying to get. I finally did start doing that and I think the video came out pretty great.
Another friend of mine with a really cool car. I convinced him to take a detour into Brea Canyon where I knew I could get some really cool shots of the car. I already had this song in mind when I was filming because it was the only 50’s sounding song I had a license to. I didn’t really keep it in mind when I got my footage but I made all my cuts according to the music. This video came out really cool. I shot the entire thing in slow motion though and playing back all the footage can get a bit tedious. I’m not that big a fan so I will use slow motion sparingly. The whole thing was shot using my spider steady stabilizer.
I got a new spider steady for my camera so I took it out to the Huntington Beach pier and shot a bunch of footage. I didn’t have a story in mind or any type of shot list. I didn’t even have a song in mind yet. I got all the footage home and then started looking for a song that inspired me. I found this song by Katrina Stone and it started shaping a story in my mind. I edited the footage according to the beats of the music and pretty much every edit happens on a beat. I really like this video.
The big learning here is to always make sure to check the record button. Initially, this commercial was going to use an actor as the personification of wind, similar to the Mayhem commercials. I thought I recorded all that footage but when I went back to edit, I realized that footage was gone. I couldn’t film pick up shots because that next day was really sunny when the initial day of filming was cloudy. Fortunately, I did film some POV shots of the wind so add a quick wind sound effect and there you go. Here also you can see the problems with the lighting and my failed attempts at color correction as I try to appear a regular human shade on camera.
This is the first safety video I made using the green screen. I got my dealership crew to stand in as actors and we filmed a few quick little scenes over there and I wove it into the grander speech of the safety topic in front of the green screen. It was really fun to film and definitely giving me some more experience as a director.