I'm heading up to Powder Mountain quite a bit this season to lend my hand as the Powder Mountain Ski School video advisor, but my time on the mountain also gives me the opportunity to work on my photography skills. Here's a photo of a nice guy named Josh from Breckenridge.
When I created the original video about John Young, a SLC luthier, I knew it was too long at almost 15 minutes in length. While I love hearing all about the various aspects of the violin making world, I finally found time to cut it down to less than five minutes long. This is hopefully beneficial for folks, such as myself, who have a hard time watching anything more than a couple minutes long.
It's finally snowing again, so it's time for me to post some photos I took on my first day of "work" as the video advisor at Powder Mountain Ski School just after our last round of snow earlier this month.
Nothing like a fast paced jib fest hosted by SLUG magazine to celebrate the waves of new snow finally hitting Utah!
"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow." - Albert Einstein
This video features my good friend and old high school buddy, Jon Malmberg, showing that the years haven't tempered his enthusiasm for life. I really wanted to create a short documentary with an interview with Jon, but I got impatient and threw this together. Besides, as you can tell in the video, Jon is a hard guy to catch up with.
Raised on the soggy side of Washington state, he now lives in Hood River, Oregon where he's close to the Columbia River and Mt Hood. He's burned through the sports of windsurfing (livin' in a van down by the river), kiteboarding (spending a stint in Maui working for Naish), and now he seems to be focusing on paragliding, jumping off of things, and doing both of these two activities on skis. You can check out his photos at http://www.jbamphoto.com
Winter appears to finally be here, and what better way to kick off the season than by shooting video of the best ski instructors in the Intermountain West on a bluebird day at Snowbird. The goal was to video the fifty or so instructors skiing three different tasks and provide the video for viewing and analysis at the end of the day. Sounds easy, but along the way I had to figure out how to quickly download and provide the videos to each of the six groups to analyze on separate laptops. First, I shot at 1080i instead of 1080p, so I could ingest the files through iMovie on my Macbook Pro, which also converted them to 540p QT files. Then I catalogued the files into pre-made folders for each of the groups and transferred them via a FW800 drive and gig sticks. This all went well, except for the few PC laptops which didn't read the QT files. In the end I'll try to stick with Macs for the entire process, or do more testing on what files play easily on PCs. Back at home I converted all the files to mp4 and uploaded them to Sprongo for the instructors to view and analyze to their hearts content in the months ahead.
I just completed a video featuring the local Salt Lake City luthier John Young, whose violins are bought by clients around the globe. I hope it's a nice little peek into the world of a man whose life is devoted to creating beautiful, and functional, works of art. Shot primarily on a Canon T2i and the new Canon 70D, it was edited in Premiere Pro and color corrected using MB Looks and Colorista. I added film grain to hopefully give it a more organic feel than a crisp 1080p HD video.
The ski season is already going strong...at least it is at 10,000 feet elevation in the Colorado Mountains. I just returned from a week at Copper Mountain supporting our local ski team and working on my action photo-taking skills, as well as shooting videos for the athletes and coaches. Everyone was able to get their groove back after months off the snow, and we were especially lucky to have some spectacular Westminster College athletes with us.
Here's a video I made for the ski team's annual banquet and fundraiser being held this weekend.
As I archived old projects to make room on my hard drives, I came across some video I shot this summer during a family trip to Alaska to celebrate my folks' 50th wedding anniversary. This short piece was an experiment in color grading using MB Looks and then exporting into a QT Prores 422 Proxy format in 720p before uploading to Vimeo. I normally export directly to H264, but I wanted to see if the quality held up better exporting to Prores before the upload. I think the difference is minor, but I'll be doing this on future projects to see how it works in 720p and 1080p.
I don't claim to be a photographer of any caliber at all (it would be a discredit to all the skilled photographers out there if I did), but I do enjoy tinkering around in Photoshop trying to make average photos look their best. Here's one from a recent dance performance and another of the local mountains.
For this promotional video I was faced with the dilemma of not having a lot of video footage and a limited amount of photos to work with to make the video. I did have the interviews I'd shot, but the limited amount of video led me to create a more kinematic graphic flow for the video. The interviews were edited in Premiere Pro, but the bulk of the project was completed in After Effects using a virtual camera and many null objects to move all the frames around the screen.
I just completed the first of two videos for the Utah Special Olympics. I'm especially happy with the combination of beautiful music, compelling imagery of the amazing athletes, and the voice over by a teenager. I wanted to create an emotional, subjective piece that aimed for a visceral reaction from the viewer. The CEO and her staff at the Utah Special Olympics were emotionally moved by the video, which was my intent -- I hope we can do the same with the next video.
We're excited to be creating product videos for RAMP Sports skis. RAMP is based out of Park City, Utah and uses eco-friendly techniques and cutting edge technologies to create performance oriented skis/snowboards. This video is one of thirteen we've created for this year's line up.
Here's another performance by the Kairos Dance Company out of Los Angeles, CA. Choreography by Hazel Clarke. I shot this on a 1080p Panasonic HD camera.
It's been a while since we posted anything, and we're currently in the middle of a lot of different projects, so...in the mean time here's a video to show we're still alive.
We shot the footage over a year ago, but it looks like we'll soon be finishing up six training videos for the Intermountain Division of the Professional Ski Instructors of America (PSIA-I). I love skiing, so it's great to work with such high level instructors, and I enjoyed the chance to learn more about the fundamental movements of skiing. The videos will hopefully aid ski instructors become better skiers and instructors for their clients. Here's one of the six videos.
I just finished a video for the G-Force Bobsled and Skeleton program in Park City, Utah. The short video features olympic medalists Shauna Rohbock and Valerie Fleming speaking about the program that's designed to train the next generation of Olympic hopefuls. Check out this and other programs offered at the Utah Olympic Park.
Getting kids out into the mountains and onto skis? Sounds like a good cause to me. That's what the (S)heJumps into the Canyon program is all about. Over four weekends in March, volunteers teach kids from local Boys and Girls clubs how to ski on the slopes of Alta Ski area. Here's a video we put together to highlight the program and hopefully get other folks to get similar programs started across the country, the continent, and the world. SheJumps is a non-profit started by Claire Smallwood (skiing evangelist / sous chef), Vanessa Pierce (RAMP Sports Communications director), and Lynsey Dyer (big mtn pro skier).
