Things To Do This Fall

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Things to do this fall:

Savor the sound of crows crying through cold air.

Walk in the forest and understand its changing colors and where they come from.

Dwell within a pile of bright, cold leaves.

Capture the ghost of Halloween, discover its secrets and preach the Gospel to it.

Run full tilt in the cold till I taste my own blood.

Listen to college football on a warm Saturday afternoon on a crackly radio.

Be chased through a foggy wood by a quietly padding werewolf.

Drink hot coffee on a cold morning.

Uncover the essence of the ripe apple.

Watch the rain collect fallen leaves at drainage gates.

Go a’viking over the lake and between the misty boles of a November forest.

Find the exact point where Fall ends and Winter begins.

Video Marketing for Fotodiox

So, in April I finally graduated from working retail into my first real full-time video job! I’m working for an awesome company in Chicagoland called Fotodiox. They make pretty sweet photo and video gear and it’s been a blast to be a part of their video marketing team. Here are a few videos I’ve helped them make.

Preaching To Myself: 10 Things People Who Didn’t Vote For Obama Can Do in the Next Four Years

I was really down in the dumps the day after the election. Then I decided to sit down and come up with a list of things I could do rather than just mope about. This list is as much for me as it is for anyone else who wasn’t thrilled with the outcome of the election. I’m no great political thinker, but in light of recent events I’m starting to realize how important it is for even the least politically minded to step up and take action. Here are ten things people who didn’t vote for Obama can do in the next four years:

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Dearest Ray

Ray Bradbury died today at the age of 91. I left this rocket with some yellow carnations that looked like dandelions in downtown Waukegan tonight, near a mural depicting his smiling face. I grew up in Waukegan IL, playing in the same ravines that Ray did as a child. I always dreamed of meeting him and talking about life with him and having him read my poetry and give me his honest opinion about it. He revolutionized my whole outlook on life and art. His prose powerfully displayed the intense poetry of God’s creation. I read him so much that it seemed he was in my head. Sometimes he felt like the closest friend I ever had. I’m going to miss him a lot.

 

“Dearest Ray

You will be greatly missed

I wish I could have met you

I pray you are in everlasting Rocket Summer Country”

february

Here’s the project, finally finished, that I mentioned in this post a few weeks ago. Shooting every day of a month was an incredibly taxing but rewarding experience. It’s exciting, if a bit strange, to see my a month of my life distilled down to a few minutes of video. It was a lot of fun and I just might do it again.

Sledding In The Dark

I like shooting video essays. I learn new things about my equipment, practice new techniques, and end up with a compact, self contained film. Capturing the mundane and showing it for what it really is, the hidden magic of God’s beautiful creation, is one of my greatest passions. It’s what drives me as a filmmaker.

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Road Films

I love traveling. Driving long distances through corn fields and mountains, crossing rivers and state lines from morning to night, seeing new places and familiar landmarks from well-trodden routes, eating fast food and sampling local sodas at gas stations––It’s just a blast for me. Lately I’ve been trying to capture the essence of those trips on video. Last winter I shot my families exodus from Detroit to Chicago, and this spring I tried to capture a trip from Michigan to South Carolina. Both sequences use similar editing and pacing, something I didn’t realize until later while watching them back-to-back. I guess you could call the first a rough draft and the second a revision.

Summer Farm

Here’s a quick test video I made this summer on my Grandparents’ farm with my new Canon Canon Vixia HF R100. Not the highest quality HD, but that’s what I expected with this lower end camera. Still, some fun images.

Valedictorian

Jeremy Sanders and I made this Spider-Man fan film over our sophomore year. He directed and starred and I ran the camera and edited. We lost one camera and dented a tripod pretty bad. Good memories.