Category Archives: Uncategorized

#superbluebloodmoon

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A supermoon + blue moon + lunar eclipse = #superbluebloodmoon, a rare celestial phenomenon that captivated the world on January 31, 2018.

I captured a timelapse of the supermoon on the night of January 30th approximately twelve hours before the lunar eclipse. During a supermoon the moon appears larger in the sky and significantly brighter. This is due to the orbit reaching its closest approach to earth (the perigee) in conjunction with a full moon.

I drove 45min north to Charlotte, North Carolina to film the moon passing behind the Bank of America Corporate Center, the tallest building in the state. Using the Moon Seeker app on my iPhone, I knew where the moon would rise. I chose an exit off-ramp near the Carolina Panther’s stadium and filmed for almost 20 minutes using a 70-200mm lens with a 2x teleconverter. The tripod positioning was just right to capture the moon passing behind the spires of the crown as the sky grew dark.

I put it online through the Tried & True Facebook page. Throughout the next day we received dozens of media requests. Filming and posting the clip was an attempt to capitalize on supermoon interest to gain earned media exposure locally and nationally for this production company. The clip was filmed in 4k and downscaled to 1920X1080p (full HD) so that I could add a digital zoom in post.

In the two days following the event, the clip was shared by thousands of people and viewed online over 1 million times cumulatively across multiple platforms. It was broadcast nationally on HLN and appeared locally on the Charlotte ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates. CNN even paired our timelapse with footage from NASA. Because Reuters and Storyful.com picked up the clip, it has run in a number of newspaper sites around the world including The Washington Post. 

 






 

Bringing Back American Manufacturing

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Giti Tire is a Japanese tire manufacturer that has built a new half billion dollar factory in the South Carolina upstate. They partnered with Wal-Mart exclusively to sell the tires manufactured in the United States. The grand opening involved a press conference and factory tour featuring executives from Giti, Greg Foran the CEO of Wal-Mart USA and the Governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster.

US Open Sizzle

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Above is a reel consisting of our very best footage from the past two years working for the USTA. It is cut to a dubstep track because the music allows me as an editor to fit more content into the edit with quick cuts while still keeping the duration to 2min. I did also cut a 1min version for Facebook and made a square aspect ratio for Instagram.

At the US Open I am hired to cover match action during the second week in Arthur Ashe Stadium. The first week of the tournament was spent filming interviews of players doing promos for The Hopman Cup and The Australian Open for Tennis Australia. After the TA work was finished I transitioned over to the USTA.

This tournament is loud and very New York. Grand Slam tennis tournaments each have a different atmosphere. I like filming in Ashe. You can hear the train, the planes flying into LaGuardia. The patrons are rowdy/boisterous too. I like going up into the stands, getting tilt shift lenses out to make miniatures in the world’s largest tennis stadium. It’s fun to shoot Manhattan from Queens. The access is excellent. During a match I cover the entire stadium but mostly remain in the pit switching lenses depending on where we are in the match.

But almost every point is covered and the USTA uses that footage throughout the year in ticket package promos, in-stadium highlights, and during the Open in daily recaps. Their editors work almost all night after a match ends to turn the piece around before the grounds open the next day. I really like this job. It’s exciting. There’s a lot of adrenaline and pressure to capture the shot in the moment. At other tournaments the AELTC or FFT is not counting on me to get the Championship Point at Wimbledon or the French Open. The USTA by contrast will end up using my clip possibly for years to come.

I was really pleased that that USTA picked the above video as their year-end closer on social media. 

Best Summer Camp Video Ever

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Camp Greystone had us back to campus in 2017 to make a new camp video. The mission was to pack every exciting activity offered into a short, watchable video to get campers excited to return year after year. It is also now used as a recruiting tool for prospective first time campers.

Using the new DJI Inspire 2 with an Olympus 45mm lens, I was able to capture telephoto drone shots of activities like ziplining, the big slide or the blob. It was a great use of the drone as it could keep pace with any fast moving subjects. We used it for what appear to be jib shots over water and more. It was fun to return to a camp we had so thoroughly covered back in 2014 and redo essentially the same video but with entirely different equipment. The lenses, the gimbal the cameras etc were all new and helped us frame things up and do things differently than before. In other words, we were not merely repeating our greatest hits.

For me, Greystone will always be a memorable job because we were on location and Ashley went into labor two weeks early. We tried driving back to our hospital in Charlotte, but made it as far as Spartanburg, SC. Our daughter will forever be a South Carolinian because we were at Greystone working on this video!

It really is a great camp. It was a great job to have in 2017 too. I love speed-ramping high-energy action. There are so many different times when kids are flying through the air too at this camp. We went back and forth to camp a half dozen times covering different events like the Fourth of July or Carnival. We definitely got a healthy dose of summer fun!

The Mystery of Roland-Garros

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Camille Saint-Saëns has long been a composer I have appreciated. Aquarium from Carnival of the Animals is used a lot in popular culture. Admittedly it may be one of the most popular pieces today written in 1884. Because it has fallen into public domain, the music licensing required is the purchase of a performance of the music. Audio Network, the British subscription service had an excellent recording of the movement for an affordable price.

The FFT tasked me with making something different. My immediate boss said, “show Roland Garros through your eyes.” They are accustomed to a typical tennis highlight. I was challenged to make something new. After reviewing rushes of my dailies, the idea to use Aquarium struck me. A tournament like Wimbledon all matches well. White uniforms, green grass, no logos. The French Open was more challenging. There are more colors, shot compositions are not as clean. That’s when it hit me to make the footage black and white, boost the contrast and make my own avant-garde French Film. The music and the black and white clips were a hit. My employers were pleased with one FFT employee comparing it to something from Cannes. There’s admittedly a great lack of tennis in the piece but that’s okay. The intention was to show the atmosphere for patrons, be a little arty and be very French.

The FFT used this piece to close out the year 2017 on social media. It ends with the words, “see you next year” in French.

Weeklong Warriors

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Cleveland County North Carolina’s Economic Development Partnership is a client of Little Red Bird. LRB is a Charlotte-based advertising agency that we have done work for on and off for four years. We really enjoy working for Karen Bennetts and her creative director, Tim Paulson.

Tim created a storyboard which he pitched to the client for a video that would encompass the vibrancy of Cleveland County’s Millennial workforce. The CCEDP has the stated goal of actively recruiting new industry. To this end the organization works to promote the healthy, dynamic, diverse communities and offerings of the county.

This video is something that was proposed as and is now used as a tool to show prospective businesses that Cleveland County has a lot to offer. There’s outdoor activity and community for the young, educated workforce. There are already factories succeeding in the region. Hopefully one can watch this video and get the feeling that there are many opportunities awaiting in “Charlotte’s Backyard.”

The shoot was a four day production with five factory locations, two restaurants, a county fair with a helicopter ride, a hike up to a rocky bluff, a controlled set for the opening sequence and so on. Working off the storyboard meant that match cuts, sound effects, whoosh transitions and more had to be timed correctly and filmed exactingly.

Smart Teams Play on Smartcourts

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PlaySight’s SmartCourt is a system of internet-connected HD cameras that can be installed around any court, for any sport. SmartCourts offer multi-angle video review instantly from a courtside touchscreen or tablet, or later from any device with the PlaySight App. Everything that happens on a SmartCourt is automatically recorded and saved in the cloud. You can even live stream your practice, game or match to a global audience. 
We have created over 70 videos for PlaySight over the past three years. This video for Ensworth Academy in Nashville really represents the culmination of a large corporate expansion. The full integration of PlaySight throughout all sports is portrayed in the piece above as we hear from basketball, swim, tennis, volleyball and competitive dance coaches.
Something special to note is that all seated interviews were shot with a Rhino slider and Rhino arc. This creates a subtle parallax effect as the subject remains in the same part of the frame, but the background appears to be moving.

Tennis On The Roof

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Tennis Australia approached us to cover a team announcement for The Laver Cup at a JP Morgan skyscraper on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Members of Team Europe and Team World were present. Our second shooter for the day was Tried & True’s Ian Davidson. We arrived two hours in advance of the event to scout the rooftop location and test audio for the press conference portion of the morning.

We had the objective of trying to make The Laver Cup piece appealing to a younger audience, making the video playful, finding a New York sounding track while retaining the air of a classy affair. We filmed from 9am-1pm and I edited a VNR (video news release) for Australian television that afternoon. That night, I created this same-day-edit that was released on all Laver Cup platforms immediately. The piece made it through multiple rounds of revision, I hit send from the airport lounge in LaGuardia the next day and we successfully became the last piece of tennis news before the US Open draw. (The US Open sucks up all media attention at the end of August and beginning of September).

It was quite a day riding elevators with tennis stars to a rooftop one-thousand feet above sea level to film them playing around against the Manhattan skyline.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pictured above are our cameras filming timelapses of the city and Ian capturing a shot of tennis legend Rod Laver hitting a ball into the glass revolving door.

Chicago’s “Asthma Van”

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Premier Inc, a healthcare company headquartered in Charlotte, NC sent us to the south side of Chicago. Our mission was to document the community benefits of Mobile Care, otherwise known as the asthma van. A traveling RV visits elementary schools coordinating with local hospitals to deliver asthma control medication and checkup on at-risk patients.

The American Lung Association has given the neighborhoods of South Chicago an F grade for air quality. 25-30% of children have exacerbated asthma as a result of the particulate matter in the air.

The truly astounding metrics are that kids who once were missing 25+ days of school now only miss one or two in a year due to asthma. The Asthma Van brought emergency room visits from 700 down to only 100 over the course of three years. This saves the hospital money and benefits the community and quality of life of inner city kids.

I opened the piece with a drone shot of the community next to large petroleum and coal refineries. It should hammer home the idea that the air is terrible. Just working there for two days, we found ourselves coughing.

It’s good to see a community outreach project providing such successful healthcare.

The above Mobile Care video was for the winner of the Premier Cares Award, an honor for community agencies and health organizations that support people excluded from, or underserved by, the mainstream health delivery system.

The runners up were also represented by videos we produced. One was a suicide prevention clinic in rural Idaho. Another is a teen empowerment program in Washington DC helping young mothers. It was rewarding to visit and learn about the programs and meet the people serving these communities. The Idaho trip stands out because it was our first time ever visiting let alone filming inside a jail.

Suicide Prevention Clinic in Idaho:

Teen Mother Empowerment Program in Washington DC:

These projects were completed under the confident guidance and direction of Tyler LaCross and Ron Randle of Premier Inc. Tyler second shot and produced. He and Ron consulted the transcript to determine what sound bites of our hours of interviews would make it into the finished pieces. the above videos were used at the Breakthroughs 2017 Conference in Washington DC.

James Funeral Home

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James Funeral Home proudly offers their clients: Traditional Funerals; Graveside Services; Direct Burial; Direct Cremation; Cremation with a Memorial Service; Service with Cremation to Follow; Transportation of Remains to or from anywhere in the world …All at the best price and highest quality.

The above video was created for social media and resides on the home page for James Funeral Home. For anyone who has recently experienced a death and is looking online for a Lake Norman, North Carolina area funeral home, this video would be a way to become familiar with the business. It’s part tour and part mission statement.

Wimbledon 2017

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Our duty was to serve as remote editor to The Championships this year.

In late 2016 Ashley and I found out that she was pregnant with our second child and that the due date was during Wimbledon. I informed the All England Club that we would be unable to work The Championships in 2017. It was unfortunate as I had already booked travel and accommodation. However witnessing the birth of my second child was certainly worth remaining stateside! 🙂 Baby Lucy and her Mama are doing spectacularly.

Alexandra Willis, the head of communications and digital content, for the AELTC was kind enough to employ me for a number of remote edits prior to and during Wimbledon. I ended up making sixteen videos. Below are a few of the most interesting for different reasons.

This year McCann London made a proper commercial that ran on ESPN. Roger Federer was nice enough to take part. A crew from McCann shot Roger in Dubai earlier in 2017. I was thankful to have the post-production job of putting together a behind the scenes vignette covering the shoot. Amazingly, this piece generated 1.5 million views. It’s my second most-watched tennis video ever.

Additionally we worked with McCann submitting footage from 2015 and 2016 for use in additional Pursuit of Greatness campaign videos. Most significantly I had the opportunity to cut a handful of “My Wimbledon Memory” videos. Two starred Federer watching clips of himself from the past. He retweeted one where he watched himself beat Pete Sampras. It is still exciting to have one of the most recognizable athletes in the world and the greatest male tennis player retweet our video not long before playing in the Finals.

Andy Murray is notoriously dull. The British people do love and respect him as their great 21st century male tennis player. He was the defending champion and World No. 1 this year too. I had fun doing my best to make a series of videos starring Andy interesting where he performed a number of children’s tasks from a 2017 Wimbledon pamphlet. This one was my attempt to add humor through editing and music cues.

The Opening Gates montage was also a fun one to cut. I got to use my own unused footage from previous years in addition to footage from the Wimbledon archive dating back to the 1940s. In fact, I cut this video the night before the tournament started from North Carolina. Wimbledon released it. Ashley went into labor. She gave birth. Later that day I looked at my phone and saw that it had 50,000 views on Instagram. There are times I still marvel that we live in a day and age where the cloud and high speed internet allow for this kind of remote editing. We were having a baby in America yet were still very involved with the tournament.

For the 131st time, the gates are set to open at #Wimbledon…

A post shared by Wimbledon (@wimbledon) on

At the end of the Opening Gates montage note the kinetic logo outro. This motion graphics animation was also a request of the AELTC. It has been nice to know that even while I did not shoot Wimbledon in 2017, the majority of all videos produced were marked with my original graphic.

Some edits were as simple and short as this cover photo video. As these trophies remain the same year after year, recycling my old footage was entirely appropriate.

This one is broll of the grounds being meticulously prepared. It’s nice that I overshot and was early arriving last year so that an original piece could be made in 2017.

19 days to go. Time to spruce the place up… #wimbledon

A post shared by Wimbledon (@wimbledon) on

Lastly and most significantly I made the My Wimbledon Experience videos. Each year these are in partnership with IBM. Broll footage from around the grounds of different iconic activities edited to music makes up the skeleton of a video that can be personalized and populated with your own smartphone photos of the event. Patrons and viewers at home are encouraged to insert their own snapshots into the video via the Wimbledon App. (IBM programs a user-friendly interface). Then the app allows for quick and easy posting to all social media platforms. This particular video may end up being our most viewed overall if one counts all of the thousands of individualized iterations in London and across the globe.

Here’s what a screengrab of the personalized video portion of the app looks like:

It was a privilege to be included in an impressive team of pros pushing hard on social media during a two week stint when the attention of the world is on SW19.

Arrogantly Shabby

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With pride the vacation community of Pawleys Island has long held the motto, “arrogantly shabby.” The historic architecture dates back to the days of Carolina rice plantations. The South Carolina National Heritage Corridor is an organization that seeks to promote the best cultural and natural offerings within the state.  They sent me on location to Pawleys Island in September not long after Hurricane Irma had spun out along the Carolina Coastline. The dunes were wiped out but otherwise, the island suffered very little damage.

It was a solid three days filming outdoor activities from surfing to kayaking in a wildlife wetland preserve. There were gators, egrets and a pretty sunrise with pelicans flying over the horizon.

My assignment was to create short 30second broll videos that summed up the area for different generations. These differing generational clips are now running as targeted video ads on Facebook. Gen-Xers were shown doing more active things like bicycling and fishing while Boomers were shown holding hands, relaxing and eating. An all purpose 1min video has the best of everything and is aimed at the widest audience. Pawleys is a place I would like to return. In the fall the breeze coming off the ocean onto the porches of the inns was very, very relaxing.

Gen-X Video:

Baby Boomer Video:

General Purpose Highlight: