Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

City Lights

Cabin Fever set in this weekend, so I hopped in the car and snapped a couple of quick photos on Lookout Mountain, near Golden, Colorado.

Nerd Power! – My video, Signal To Noise, Goes Crazy Viral!

A short film I shot at the VLA that combines motion-graphics and time-lapse footage has gone and blowed up. For whatever reason, this thing has landed ALL OVER the Interwebs.

When I completed it, I was really happy with the results, and I thought it looked pretty cool, but in no way did I expect the kind of enthusiasm with which it was received.

Within just a couple days of posting it, the video had racked up 60,000 views, and was shared on a bevy of notable websites, including the Vimeo front page, The Atlantic magazine, Discovery Magazine, ThinkGeek, and many others.
It even got mentioned by my Twitter pal, Star Trek actress and ridiculously nice person, Jeri Ryan. (Don’t ask me how I pulled that one off.  I’m still scratchin’ my head, too, buddy.)

The reaction to this thing has been absolutely BANANAS. And overwhelmingly positive and supportive.
I simply cannot express how happily surprised, and how utterly grateful and appreciative I am to everyone who’s shared the link, “liked” the video and left comments.

The Vimeo community, in particular, has been amazingly gracious and engaged– asking all kinds of extraordinarily thoughtful questions, and contributing a great deal of extremely helpful advice and tips.

I’ve tried hard to reciprocate the warm welcome I’ve received by handing out as much insight into the piece’s production as I can, but it seems like such a small gesture in comparison to how fantastic this has made me feel.

In the weeks to come, I’m hoping to post some sort of tutorial here, on this blog, as my way of saying “thank you” to everyone who made this such a stellar week for me.

Honestly, you guys– you’ve made a dork in Colorado feel like a million bucks. And then some. I can’t thank you enough.

Very Large Array

This September, I threw all my camera gear into the car and drove South to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: shoot time-lapse footage of the radio telescopes at the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico.

I’ve been looking for interesting subject matter to use as a basis for motion-tracking and compositing exercises in After Effects, and I thought the VLA would be perfect source material.

Unfortunately, a tire on my car started failing just as I was pulling into Socorro, and I had to turn around and drive back to Albuquerque to get it replaced, which cost me a full night and day of shooting.

Undeterred, I sped back towards Socorro the minute they lowered the car off the lift, and was able to set up the cameras in time to shoot a beautiful New Mexico sunset, and about 4 hours worth of astro time-lapse that night.

I went back early the next day and got set up again, managing to shoot for about an hour or so before a nasty-looking storm-front started rolling in, which was a pretty huge bummer.  The clouds looked amazing as they were gathering over the array, but unfortunately, they didn’t move out again, so most of the day I was shooting in the rain, under really flat light, with the lenses pointed at a solid, pewter slab of overcast sky. Not ideal conditions for any kind of photography, and definitely not time-lapse, which depends so heavily on shifting skies to remain visually compelling. Luckily, the scientist/operator made some fairly dramatic moves with the dishes, so there’s hopefully still enough there to hold a viewer’s interest.

I think the footage I managed to get will yield some cool results if I push it far enough in After Effects, but I’d really like to give it another shot this summer. It really was a fascinating place to film, and I’ll definitely be going back soon.

In the meantime– keep an eye on this site. I should be posting the results within the next month or two.