Tag Archives: video

The Nest

This is a local television commercial running in the Columbia, SC market. The Nest is a home appliance store owned and operated by Cregger Company. We filmed and edited this video as the video production arm of Sting Creative. Cregger has been a longtime client of Hendrik and Erin van Vuuren, the owners of Sting. Located in downtown Columbia, our objective was to show the general public that The Nest sells the highest end appliances, plumbing fixtures and lighting. We had 30 seconds to cover as much of the store as possible. Our motorized, programmable Rhino Slider and Arc really came in handy to get smooth panning shots of the rooms. We also made ample use of the MoVi M5 to capture our actors moving throughout the showroom. This was a one day shoot and a single day edit.

 

Bringing Back American Manufacturing

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


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

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!

Weeklong Warriors

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

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.

Chicago’s “Asthma Van”

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.

Bedgear Impact Day

“CEO Eugene Alletto says he’s thrilled to have part of his Bedgear operations in Rock Hill. Each year, he leads a “Day of Impact” to give back to the community. Alletto, who founded the maker of “performance” pillows, bedding and mattresses in 2009, joined 80 of his employees at Bedgear’s Rock Hill site on Langston Street to assemble 100 care packages in backpacks to donate to Pilgrims’ Inn shelter.

The shelter primarily helps homeless and low-income women and young children get back on their feet. It offers support services such as housing, education and job placement assistance, food pantries and child care.” – Rock Hill Herald

The above video summarizes the above charitable works in addition to Bedgear annual meeting at their production facility in Rock Hill.

 

Inside a Cookie/Cracker Factory

Astronaut is a full-service creative agency run by Stephen Lockwood in Winston-Salem, NC. Previously we had worked together on a shoot for a Southern Living planned community and a video about Hayward’s pool pumps. T&T operates as the production arm of the ad agency.

The video above was created on behalf of Dewey’s Bakery. The founder and owner of Astronaut, Stephen Lockwood, acted as the director and conducted all client relations. Dewey’s has been a longstanding client of Astronaut. See this link for their work. We were thankful to be brought on to help service this video need.

Dewey’s is famed for their Moravian cookies and bakes private label cookies and crackers for stores like Harris Teeter and Trader Joe’s. They also have a handful of storefronts selling Dewey’s labeled goods in the Winston-Salem area. They were to be exhibiting at the Summer Fancy Foods Show at the Javits Center in NYC and needed a video loop showing their clean and efficient facility. The booth was designed to look like the interior of one of the traditional old Dewey’s Bakery locations, but with a tv framed up in the center back wall.

We spent one day shooting at four locations to gather broll depicting the process of crackers and two different types of cookies being made and packaged. A lot of gimbal work was used as well as a drone indoors. We did whatever was necessary to get the shots. We supplemented with additional lighting, filmed in slow motion, put the camera in the oven at one point and let a GoPro ride the conveyor with cookies about to be baked.

This was a great field trip to a well-known and beloved North Carolina institution. Our hope is that the video served Dewey’s well at the exhibition and helped them to land additional contracts with supermarket chains etc.

UPDATE:

The Javits Center convention was a success. The factories are backlogged with cookie production orders.

We ended up returning to Dewey’s in late 2017 to update the video to show some packaging, displays and to shoot more footage of different parts of the factory. The new piece was used at an internal convention and on social media.

 

 

Honoring WWII Veterans

This past Veteran’s Day we had the privilege of filming a piece for the retirement community, Plantation Village. A luncheon was hosted on the deck of the USS North Carolina in Wilmington, NC. Marines from nearby Camp Lejeune were on hand to meet, greet and honor veterans of WWII, Korea and Vietnam.

Monarch Medical Tech

Monarch Medical Technology organized the first annual user group meeting in mid-October. Industry innovators afrom leading hospitals and networks shared implementation and best practices/ valuable lessons learned from using EndoTool IV and EndoTool SubQ across hospital unites and patient populations.

This conference went in depth on glucose management. Our responsibility was to make the highlight above and to film a number of patient testimonials. Additionally we also filmed a multi-part interview with Dr Patrick Burgess, the inventor of EndoTool®, the wireless, convenient algorithmic blood sugar monitoring and glucose control system .

Rotoscoping

To rotoscope video is to trace over each frame creating a cartoon. The cartoon bares a remarkable photo-realistic quality because that’s exactly what it was derived from. For this piece, the tournament was hedging that Federer would win a fifth title at Indian Wells. I was hired to spend a week tracing frames of video to create the animated sequences within the below piece. The hand drawn quality is intended to immediately catch the viewer’s attention. Rather than an average action highlight, the video should transcend to be a more memorable piece. The tracing and animating took approximately one week. The video was completed pre-tournament. The footage of Federer winning was inserted right after it happened on the last day of the BNP Paribas Open 2017.