Europe July 2010 - part one

DAY ONE
From Heathrow, I flew down to Nice to pick up the hire car - more on that ridiculousness later.
The drive from Nice, along the south coast of France and down through northern Italy is, of course, quite beautiful. I was very tempted to stop off at one of the many golden sandy beaches I could see from the mountain road but knew I had to get to Peralta before sunset or I'd be very lost.

To get to Peralta (which is on no GPS system I've used yet), you have to get to a tiny village and then just know the way as the "sign posts" are little bits of wood shaped like an arrow and nailed to a wall or tree, randomly.

After a long day of travelling, I was very happy to arrive at Peralta and see Dinah and the dogs.

catching up

Europe July 2010 - arrival

In July, I travelled around Europe to film a lot (!) of interviews for the Fiore documentary.
Landing at Heathrow at 6am, I checked in to the hotel and travelled up to Paddington to meet with John Tully at Brunswick Films. They have got one of the most impressive film archives of Formula 1 racing and interview footage from the 70s and 80s. However, John also has lovely video of Fiore at work and at rest. He has been kind enough to let me use this in our documentary - very exciting news!

live stream for KCI and Sonic Foundry

API Productions partners with Sonic Foundry to engineer the live streaming of KCI's town hall meetings. The stream is streamed from their headquarters in San Antonio and sent live to their divisions around the U.S and Europe.

Austin Regional Clinic 30th Anniversary videos

Austin Regional Clinic are celebrating their 30th Anniversary and have asked API Productions to produce videos of some of their clients' stories. Having produced their Physician's Academy DVD, we are now enjoying working on this project - these are some amazing stories.

Psych Fest III

Austin's Black Angels held their third Psych Fest at the Mohawk in downtown Austin. Producer James Oswald asked us to film the outside stage using a variety of lenses and cameras. We got him in touch with Michael Koshkin who works with the PixelCam and Aaron Brown, who runs a Skycrane jib arm. We used a weird fisheye lens that vignettes the picture and ditorts light. We're looking forward to seeing the DVDs later in the year. The line-up included the Black Angels, the Raveonettes and Warpaint.

promo video for Zach Scott Theatre

One of our non-profit clients is the Zach Scott Theatre in Austin. Having created the Flash invitations for the event and the auction, we filmed their Red, Hot & Soul fundraiser event in HD with steadicam. We edited a highlights video as well as testimonials from guests.

Ted Dekker videos

Ted Dekker is a multi-million selling author. For the past few years, we have been asked to film and edit his promotional videos for each new release. Most recently, we worked on videos for his latest,"Bride Collector".

Adult Swim

Back in Austin, and straight to filming a block party for Adult Swim. They took over 6th and Red River along Emo's and set up a fairground atmosphere with games to win Adult Swim prizes and t-shirts. Lots of college kids were very happy to be getting free stuff, with the Fiery Furnaces playing on the main stage.

Baltimore training videos

After a very pleasant Greek Easter weekend in Virginia, we all met up in Baltimore to work on more employee training videos for Alchemy Systems. This time, we were working for Wyndham Hotels and staying in one of the hotels that was right next to the Orioles ballpark. On the final day, which was opening season for the Orioles and the sound guy's birthday, our client gave us all tickets to the game. Very nice, too. We also found time to visit the American Visionary Art Museum - highly recommended...

Fiore documentary update

Since we were in Canada, I took the opportunity to visit relatives of Joy Quested Nowell - the Queen Mother's milliner - who live in Ottawa. We spent a good part of the day talking about Joy's friendship with Fiore and how she was a great organising influence (!). It seems that she was also the conduit for getting Fiore one of her most prestigious commissions. A very pleasant day all round, and a big Thank You to the Nowells for opening their house.

Training videos

South By South West finishes on Saturday night. Sunday morning at 5am, we were up and at Austin airport on our way to Canada for two weeks of filming training videos. The was for Alchemy Systems who   have a pretty nice training system set-up.

SxSW 2010

API Productions again looked after the video production of the Auditorium Shores shows for South By South West 2010. In addition, we were asked to provide and coordinate crew and equipment for Baeble Music's shoot at Scoot Inn. During SXSWi, we filmed Chicken Ranch Records' showcase at Elysium while streaming it live from the venue. SXSWi also saw comedian Brian Posehn do a private show for Powered. API Productions filmed it, cut it, and uploaded it to YouTube.

Ricky Martin's filming requirements

One from the archives....

In case anyone's interested, these were Ricky Martin's requirements for being interviewed on camera in London for VH-1 / MTV (from March 2001):

________________________

Subject:     Ricky Martin - Production Requirements.

Importance:     High

Dear All,
Here are the lighting requirements for Ricky Martin.

Lights
 For the best lighting, use 2 4 foot 4 bank Keno-flo lights (right
and left flank) with bastard amber gel - use tungsten bulbs.  If not bastard
amber then cosmetic peach or cosmetic chocolate.  Any one of those three gels
work for him. 

Use a 1 K arri light with steel blue gel or soft frost
(backlight/hairlight).
Use a bounce card on the floor in front of him for his chin light
and bounce a 5K tungsten light.

 Camera

Very important camera feature is called selective skin detailing -
please ensure that the camera has this - plus 1/4 black promost filtration.  Shoot
straight on - no angle left or right and the camera should be slightly above eye
level.

 In a TV studio

Use all the lighting plus a 5 or 1O K tungsten light with the same
gel and a chimera over the light (over top of the camera).
The following is considered to be special effects lighting in
addition to standard tv lighting : -
>     24 - Studio colours
>     24 - par 64's on floor bases for up lighting of the set
>     12 - floor mount footlight units.

DRESSING ROOM
The dressing room should have a relaxed feel with candles
and dimmed lights plus a nice  sofa and chairs and , if possible ,some drapes
or a way to make it feel more 'homely'.
There should be still mineral water , apple juice , red bulls ,
fresh fruit , tea , coffee and some french bread and cheeses.

Please can you confirm to me that the above requests can be
accommodated?

______________________________

The above requests were not confirmed.

HD slow mo uploads

Uploaded these videos to Vimeo. It seems, however, that YouTube's HQ setting renders better than Vimeo... hmm..

http://www.vimeo.com/4930832

http://www.vimeo.com/4930857

They are clips from the 'savasana' portion of Abby Lentz's new "HeavyWeight Yoga" DVD. The second in the award-winning series that we're producing (!).

Acai juice

Spent the day yesterday staring at a green screen; we were making a promotional video for a client who makes healthy fruit drinks from acai, noni, goji and mangosteen juices. All very fun - background will be Brazilian scenes etc etc...

Tramps and champers

Had two great meetings today.

One was at Red River Cafe (mm) with a fitness instructor about making a proper trampoline video.

The other was at Jo's on South Congress with Mandy Lauderdale. We're planning a new music video for her single, "Champagne."

Of course, they were sandwiched by 

 - exporting video - HD takes forever to export!

 - uploading to YouTube

 - creating DVDs for two clients

 - continuing design of our new company website

 and

 - learning more than I'd care to about RSS and pixels.

Fiore De Henriquez

I'm happy to say that the documentary about the sculptress Fiore De Henriquez is coming together nicely. The executors of her estate have been very kind and are helping every step of the way. We are heading out to Peralta in June to interview some people involved in her life and see the foundry where she worked.

From this footage, we shall cut together a promo piece to raise funds to make the full-length feature about this fascinating lady.

slacker

I've been slack in posting. Mainly because I've - thankfully - been silly busy...
Quick shopping list of video projects at the moment:

- SPRING CONDOMINIUM
Edited more interviews with tenants saying how much they like it etc and putting together a marketing DVD and series of web videos for their soon-to-be re-vamped website

- HEAVYWEIGHT YOGA part II
Directed a 4-camera HD shoot of a one-hour class with interviews with the stars of the show.
Edited with FCP's multi-cam feature.
Went to the Crossings spa/retreat and filmed some beautiful slow motion on the EX-1 for the Savasana section.
Prepping the DVD design
Getting a Spanish translation recorded and dubbed for Special Features.

 - CENTRE FOR CHILD PROTECTION

Filming and editing marketing and promotional material for this, sadly, much-needed organisation.

- CulinART
Directed and edited a multi-camera shoot of a charity dinner & art event.

The charity was The Wright House - they help people living with HIV/AIDS, Cancer and Hepatitis C.

- Legal Seminar
Filming a chap give lawyers their 'furthering education' seminar .He used a lot of movie clips, including My Cousin Vinny, Forrest Gump (ugh) and A Few Good Men...

- Al Jazeera
Filmed a TV show for Al Jazeera's English station during South By South West.
There's a clip of one of the episodes here:



- South By South West
Coordinated the multi-cam shoot and stage screen for the outdoor stage at South By South West.
Headliners Explosions in the Sky were amazing!

WW2 P.O.W. video

Well, I've been away for a bit getting married and stuff. My family have been visiting, including my grandad on my mum's side.

In the Second World War, he was a sent to the Pacific (before Pearl Harbour happened) and was subsequently captured by the Japanese. He spent the rest of the war in a Japanese P.O.W camp being starved and sent down the coal mines to help the Japanese war effort.

A few days ago, we drove out to Fredericksburg (in Texas) to the Nimitz Museum, run by the family of Admiral Nimitz. It's a museum dedicated to the Pacific Theatre during World War 2 and has some very extensive displays. And it's still expanding!

About 8 years ago, he told his story on camera and I cut it together with scraps of pictures and videos found online. Here are the opening and closing graphics sequences. The full story is on YouTube.

time lapse

For Mardi Gras, I spent the evening up one of the condominium towers that are being built here in Austin. Spring Condo was celebrating with a 'topping off' party. I think this means that they've put the roof on, but I'm not sure. 

We were at this party because a few months ago, Spring Condos asked us to film views from their 32nd floor. We decided to shoot High Def time lapse of sunrise, sunset, clouds racing past etc. and cut it all together rather nicely (we think!).

Here it is:

For the tecchies, it was shot with two Sony EX-1 cameras in 720p mode. We shot between 1 and 5 frames per second for the time lapse stuff and edited on Final Cut Pro.