Blogging Withdraw

Blogging is a weird thing.  Many people will do it once or twice and then abandon their blog forever.  Trying to fight my way to some sort of notoriety quickly began to wear a little thin and I gave up.  Then blogging showed just how weird it can be….

Back in January of this year I wrote an inspired blog about how Gingers (people with red hair and low pigmentation) scare the shit out of me.  Apparently during the month of September people either really hated gingers or wanted to see pictures of a ripped Carrot Top, because in one month I received over 3,000 views of this story alone, including 600 in one day.  Now I know some people average 3,000 people a day, but some people probably put a lot more effort into their posts.

So with this interesting development, I will try blogging again.  Maybe not everyday or even every week, but when I want to share my views with the world, I will drop a line or two.

Until then feel free to learn about my fear of Gingers : http://evangraphics.wordpress.com/2008/12/23/ripped-gingers/

Nap Town (Sin City Parody)

We decided to make a Sin City parody called Nap Town to poke fun of the Sin City comic book genre but at the same time recreate some of the visuals from it.  We used quite a bit of After Effects and used a bunch of preplanning to make it work out.  The Sin City effect was created in After Effects by using 2 layers of video.  The top layer had 1 color left and the blending mode was set to Color.  The bottom layer was converted to black and white and then the curves were effected to make the grungy look.

We were able to finish this project easily by shooting right away and taking 5 hours to shoot on a lovely Friday afternoon downtown. We spent another 3 hours in the green screen lab and audio studio to get the silhouette images and the voice over narration. Post production of the special effects in After Effects probably took another 3-4 hours. Overall, it was a great experience and we are both very excited about the finished product.

Here are the storyboards and script if you would like to see them:

Nap Town Script

Baby It’s Fact Music Video

So after going through the 27 days worth of music in my iPod, Gareth and I finally found a good song at the last second that we believed we could turn into a music video.

We were able to put together a simple story board (yes my drawing is not quite as good as most chimpanzees)

The next part was the hardest, trying to find people to be in the music video. Rather than put myself or Gareth in the video, we decided to send our a Facebook status asking people if they would want to be in our video. Surprisingly, we had several good responses. The best response was actually from a friend, Nick Haughian, I had just met recently at a charity event. Nick has actually had experience working in video productions before and has experience in swing dancing.

We were lucky that he actually had another female friend who is a model and was going to be in town before she headed out to a shoot in Arizona. She and Nick had very good chemistry and we were able to shoot with very few problems.

After Gareth and I split the work getting a rough edit of the video done, we just need to focus on adding some Level and Curve adjustments. After the first test, we though a couple of the shots looked a little too much like a Metal Video, so we decided to drop the darks down.

We finished up the project the day before it was due and are fairly pleased with the outcome. If there was another week and both of our on air talents were in town, we would probably reshoot a couple shots to make them smoother, but overall, we were very happy with how aesthetically pleasing the video is.

Spring Break 2009 (I’m On A Boat – Lonely Island Parody)

These aren’t your father’s home movies….

With the ease and simple bombardment of multimedia and multimedia tools, I expect more and more people to put some thought and creativity in their home movies. Since I recently bought a small flash camcorder, I decided to see what I could do with minimal equipment. Here is the first experimental video I came up with:

The Shammy aka Sham Wow and The Polar Plunge

So, I think I have finally convinced Nuvo that I am a better asset on camera with my latest video.  Basically, I went out and interviewed some interesting people and asked humorous questions.  Like when the Sham Wow guy was doing his little spiel about spilling Coke on carpet, I exclaimed: “You’re going to ruin that carpet!”  Anyways, check it out: