By admin | December 29, 2008
Yesterday, I got the chance to be the wedding videographer for Kristen and Scott at the Newport Beach Marriot.
What made the day especially great for me was that I shot along side an amazing photographer - my girlfriend, Jules Bianchi. You can see her blog post with some of her highlights from the shoot here.
Jules brother, Jeffrey came along to operate my second camera and Tom Benedek shot some 8mm film that I can’t wait to see and incorporate into the edit.
The ceremony ended with an amazing sunset, so I put together a quick teaser with some footage from the last moments of daylight, before everyone headed inside for the reception.
By admin | December 10, 2008
Last night I attended an event for the APA (Advertising Photographers of America). While I am not a photographer myself, I went with my girlfriend Jules Bianchi, who is an amazing photographer. I found it all very interesting, however. New technologies are blurring the line between still and motion cameras and this was the major topic of the night.
The featured speaker was Vincent Laforet, a renowned photographer for the NY Times, famous for his amazing aerial photography. Most recently, he has garnered a lot of attention for ‘Reverie’ - the short film he made after getting his hands on a prototype of the just released Canon 5d Mark II, a DSLR camera that shoots both stills and full HD video.
Here is Vincent Laforet
Me, Jules Bianchi & Dina Douglass
Photos from Jules’ Blog.
By admin | October 19, 2008
Yesterday I had the chance to work on a new splash page with my girlfriend, Jules Bianchi. We worked together on the look as she had an existing site and blog that the page needed to match and she had a very specific idea of what it should look like.
Here is a screen capture of the new page:
And the old one:
(click for a larger view)
It gave me a chance to use a new technique I had read about using “CSS Sprites”. I have to thank A List Apart, a site full of amazing resources and how-to’s which talked about this technique. Here is a link to their great Tutorial on CSS Sprites.
I will post a more technical version of how I tweaked their code to work for this situation later, but here is a quick explanation:
Normally to create all the rollover buttons on the page, eight separate images would be used and the old way even meant using javascript, which is a fairly cumbersome language compared to the simplicity of the CSS used here.
Very simply, instead of creating, editing and uploading eight images, all of the needed images are combined into one image. Then I just tell each button which part to use for the normal state and which part to use when the mouse hovers over it. The file size is smaller, so the page loads faster and if it ever needs to be edited or updated, I just download and edit one image instead of eight.
Here is the image:
(click for a larger view)
When Jules had mentioned wanting to mouse over photos to reveal her logos underneath, I remembered reading about this somewhere, so I gave it a try.
By admin | October 6, 2008
Company Cafe wanted a basic informational site but needed a look that matched their business. They offer quality food service in corporate environments. So I tried to balance a color scheme that I thought would work well for a cafe with a clean, crisp layout that I might use for a more corporate setting. I also knew I wanted to use a dark solid background to bring out the colors in the pictures they sent me.
They needed a custom logo and this is what I cam up with, just a simple cursive font with some buildings in the background made to fit into the header at the top of the page…
They also wanted a splash page with a movie that would act as a little teaser for their company and what they do. They had some pictures and a script with the words they wanted to say, I just had to put it all together.
I approached it a little differently than most sites I have seen. The usual approach would be to create something like this in Flash. Being a filmmaker, I am more used to the video editing and titling software. so I used Motion (which is packaged with Final Cut Pro) and created the movie as Quicktime. Then I used a little programming trickery to hide the white Quicktime window you usually see while a movie is loading. Once it is loaded it plays normally.
By admin | October 3, 2008
I had a nice surprise in my inbox today.
Apparently Five Day DVD is a featured design on We Love WP (WeLoveWP.com) - a site that showcases custom Wordpress sites.
Only a few days ago, I found the site and browsed all the amazing work on there, getting inspiration and ideas for my own designs. They had a section where you could submit your own site, let them know about it and if they like it, they would include it on their page.
Well, I guess they did, because here it is:
Five Day DVD was my first go at Wordpress and to have it noticed on a site like this means a lot. It took me so long to get it to look like it does!
I have big plans for a new site which I plan to do all in Wordpress. Plus - I am working on my first custom theme, built from scratch. No details yet…
A big thank you to We Love WP!
By admin | September 27, 2008
I launched a new website today - www.headshotsandreels.com.
It is still a work in progress, and for now is just the single page with a simple description and a form to send an email. I will be adding some functionality to the form tonight and working on the rest of the site when I can fit it in.
So, if you know any actors looking for a website - send them on over.
By admin | September 27, 2008
One of my great friends, Derek, needed a re-design for his acting site. I have had to work on it between regular jobs, but here it is finally.
Derek Craigie
More importantly, this was the first site for a side project that has been in the works for a while now - www.headshotsandreels.com
I finally launched a temporary page today, as you will see in my next post!
By admin | September 11, 2008
For those of you coming from my film site (fatfilmz.com) you will have noticed that you ended up here at my blog. For those who just came here directly, you can pretend nothing strange is happening…
I am in the process of re-doing my site with a major re-design, not just changing the look, but the structure and focus of the site and when it re-launches I will have something very different than I have had before.
Stay tuned…
By admin | September 8, 2008
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
By admin | August 9, 2008
On August 2nd, Stephen & Jennifer were married at the St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach. The reception was held at Park Prive in Costa Mesa.
While I work on editing the full DVD, here is a sneak peak at their highlight reel, set to the music of their first dance: “Your Song” by Elton John.
The wedding’s photographer was Jesse Mergenthaler.
