Digital Story Telling: The Final Product

This is a short film I did for my digital story telling class. The idea was to sell a product using story and emotion, as opposed to the traditional thirty second television format. I developed the concept and saw it through to fruition over one month’s time. It’s not a perfect product, however the point was to tell a story and not to get the production value perfect. Enjoy!

Sony HD: The Five

This is a Sony ad series I put together with my good friend and fellow designer Ben Phenicie. These were made for Current TV in San Francisco. After submitting these spots, I was contacted by the marketing department at Sony New York and was told that they loved them. However, we’re still waiting for them to be used for broadcast.

Digital Story Telling: Production

So this week we’ve been filming non stop. Thankfully I was able to get most of my shots finished at the beginning of the week. Above is a screen shot taken from some of the footage in my short film.

Digital Story Telling: Pre-Production

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve produced videos before but I’ve almost always, to my own detriment, been able to get away with flying by the seat of my pants. It’s been an interesting process writing the script, sketching the story boards, working up a shot list and finally assembling a production check list… There’s a lot of work to do before you get boots on the ground so to speak. I think the thing that always hindered me from taking these preparatory measures was that I thought it would stifle my creative process, but what I’ve found is that I’m able to visualize the story in my mind and come up with cool ideas during the pre-pro process. I’ve posted some images of what pre-production looks like. Enjoy and stay tuned for the final product.

Digital Story Telling

I just wanted to put out there that I’m also in a class called digital story telling.  There’s only one project, so the posts about it will be sparse. Right now I’m in the process of writing my script for the project, and then I’ll move on to story boarding it, which I will post here. The idea is for us to make a three minute movie that actually ends up being an advertisement for a specific product. The first company to do this was BMW, with their series of ten web released short films known as “The Hire,” staring Clive Owen. They totally ignored the conventional advertising methods and created a new and highly effective form of advertising. Our goal is to duplicate the same emotional draw they created towards the BMW Z3 and apply it to whatever product we choose. Good luck to me!

2D to 3D Motion Graphics Test

This is something I’ve been wanting to try for a while now. I’ve seen this technique used in several documentaries recently and wanted to try it out for myself. The idea was to take a 2D image of some kind and move a camera through the scene to reveal that there is actually depth. What I did was break this painting (The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorra by John Martin) up along what I perceived to be the foreground, mid-ground and background using Photoshop. I then imported the layered Photoshop file into Apple Motion where I spaced each, of what ended up being almost twelve layers, out along the Z axis. It took quite a bit of tweaking, but ended up being really easy to do.

“Casualty” Screened at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival

From Feb 14-20, 2008 my short documentary titled “A Casualty of the Promise Land“ was screened in Missoula Montana at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.  It sounds crazy but I was in the middle of our move to Orlando when I heard they wanted to show it up there, and I didn’t pay much attention to it. It’s already airing nationally on Current TV but I’m still kinda kicking myself a little bit, ’cause it would have been cool to go up and mingle with the industry people. I honestly didn’t realize it was such a big deal until I was Google’ing my name (which I do occasionally… don’t pretend like you don’t do it too!) and the profile page for my film popped up. I took a look at the Big Sky website, and more importantly the sponsors (Sony, Avid, HBO, IndiePix Films and a whole lot more). It’s actually seems to be kinda big time! I just heard “Missoula, Montana” and immediately assumed insignificant… mistake. Well I’ll learn from this one. At least Ben Phen (who co produced the piece with me) was able to make it to Sundance this year.

Marriage Builders Commercial (Kinda)

Okay so this isn’t actually the audio for the real thing… but it’s a lot more fun.  Any way, here’s what the animation is for: This is an ongoing piece of freelance work that I’m called on to update occasionally. I don’t really have total artistic freedom, but the concept and artistic direction is totally mine. Several things where changed per client request, one of which was the color of the text. It was originally white, but they complained that it wasn’t easy enough to see… valid.  This audio is just for fun.  I’m planning on using this music for a student piece, but I thought I’d throw it on to see what it looked like.  It’s really funny how the music totally changes the feel of a piece.  If you’d like to see the original check out my website.