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Elizabeth and Jane promo video

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I was very excited to be work­ing with Liz again when approached me to shoot a promo video for her pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness. Since she does engage­ments, wed­dings, and pet por­traits, we decided to film all three types of sessions.

Liz lists some of her favourite things as her hubby, her pups1, her shoes, and her Apple prod­ucts, so I included lit­tle bits of each to give it a per­sonal touch. I also kept the grad­ing crisp and clean with colours that pop out of the screen to match Liz’s style of vibrant pho­tog­ra­phy, of which I’m a huge fan. My main goal, how­ever, was show how fun it is to be one of her sub­jects because she has a per­pet­ual smile and bub­bly per­son­al­ity that puts any­one at ease.

  1. She’s Ottawa’s own dog-whisperer, and it may be safe to say that she loves dogs as much as I love cats, per­haps even a lit­tle more. [↑]
Date  December 20, 2011
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Categories  Random Video

Jenny + Dave — Wedding Day

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A spe­cial film for a spe­cial couple.

I was given the chance to film the wed­ding of Jenny and Dave on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Everything about the day was gor­geous, from the trop­i­cal weather to the bur­geoun­ing cen­tre­pieces1 to the torch­lit recep­tion. It all came together to cre­ate an atmos­phere of sub­lime charm, and I had so much fun cap­tur­ing it all.

I make each wed­ding film as acces­si­ble as pos­si­ble, so any­one can get a sense of the day even if they weren’t there. But I also include cer­tain things that would be under­stood by only the peo­ple involved. In this film it was shots such as an uncle doing an hilar­i­ous bump-and-grind on the dance floor, or the bride tear­ing up while writ­ing her speech, or the father-in-law say­ing a few words while firmly hold­ing the groom’s hand dur­ing the tea cer­e­mony. Details such as the lat­ter may not seem like much to an out­sider, but fam­ily and friends at the wed­ding would under­stand how such a small phys­i­cal dis­play of affec­tion can mean so much.

This was by far my most chal­leng­ing wed­ding film to make, but it was well worth it. For a while, it became my rea­son for liv­ing, the one I wanted to be remem­bered for, and my goal was to deliver this film before I died. There’s a piece of my soul in it, so I can’t say how lucky I am to have been given this oppor­tu­nity to cre­ate this for Dave and Jenny, and how I happy I am to know they deserve it.

(A big thank-you to wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher Mike Adrian, who was a delight to work with, and taught me a thing or two about how to pack for des­ti­na­tion weddings.)

  1. The Four Season’s now has a rule that lim­its the size of the cen­tre­pieces, because they would some­times catch the wind and fall over. This was the last wed­ding at the Four Seasons to have such mas­sive ones, the rule being grand­fa­thered in, as Jenny and Dave planned the wed­ding right before it came into effect. [↑]
Date  December 13, 2011
Tags 
Categories  Video

Vikki & Dan — Wedding Day

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Filmed another lovely wed­ding in the Fall. The cer­e­mony was small and inti­mate with only a hand­ful of peo­ple invited, tak­ing place at the tiny look­out on Rockcliffe Parkway, while the recep­tion was a great big party at the RA Centre. One of the most unique things about this wed­ding were the paper lanterns given to all the guests. By the end of night the sky was full of them, drift­ing away beau­ti­fully above us.

It was another chance to work with the won­der­ful Liz, who is always on the top of my list of pho­tog­ra­phers I rec­om­mend for wed­dings. Not only do her pho­tos end up look­ing amaz­ing, she always works with me when cap­tur­ing all the impor­tant details, instead of against me, as I’ve noticed with some pho­tograpehrs. Check out the pho­tos in her sneak peak.

candy sushi

 

Also of note were the wed­ding favours, each box con­tain­ing a pair of candy sushi. The maki was made by rolling a flat sheet of Rice Krispie squares over a fill­ing of Gummy Worms, wrapped with Fruit Roll-Up. The nigiri had gummy sharks as the fish, also tied together with a strip of Fruit By The Foot. Small, bite-sized packs of cute and delicious.

Date  December 4, 2011
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Categories  Photos Video

Wu Wei 2

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Wu Wei, my free WordPress theme, is cur­rently the 5th most pop­u­lar theme on WordPress.com, with over 550,000 blogs using it at the moment (not includ­ing ones being self-hosted), and it’s become so suc­cess­ful that the admin­is­tra­tors have made it one of the default themes for new sign-ups. By far the most com­mon sup­port ques­tion I get is why the WordPress.com ver­sion isn’t avail­able for WordPress.org users (some have even offered to pay for an update), so I’m very pleased to announce the release of ver­sion 2 for self-hosted blogs.

The theme has been updated to take advan­tage of new fea­tures that came with WordPress 3.x, such as cus­tom header and cus­tom back­ground APIs, cus­tom menu man­age­ment, as well as var­i­ous under-the-hood fixes and improve­ments. Tags and com­ments have also been included on the front page, to bring bet­ter stan­dard­iza­tion across WordPress.com and WordPress.org versions.

People have asked me why I don’t charge for such a theme, see­ing as how I’ve poured a tremen­dous amount of time and energy into some­thing used by so many peo­ple. I can only say that Wu Wei has brought me much luck since its release, and thanks to it’s pop­u­lar­ity, I’ve met many great peo­ple1, received new design work, and even had a chance to visit Britain — things I don’t think would have been pos­si­ble if Wu Wei was a paid theme.

  1. There was even a case of an old ex-girlfriend find­ing me when she decided use Wu Wei before she dis­cov­ered who made it. [↑]
Date  September 8, 2011
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Categories  Random

Geneviève + James — Wedding Day

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Earlier this month, I had the plea­sure of film­ing Geneviève and Jamie on their wed­ding day. It was a beau­ti­ful out­door cer­e­mony in the coun­try with only about 50 peo­ple, and a vegan din­ner for the reception.

One of the inter­est­ing things I got to see was the sock dance, an old French-Canadian tra­di­tion where the eldest unmar­ried sib­ling has to don a pair of ugly socks (sym­bol­iz­ing their cold feet) and do a silly dance. People throw money at him or her, which is then col­lected for the newly mar­ried couple.

I decided to keep the grad­ing nat­ural cause there are so many vibrant colours in each scene — from tat­toos, hair dye, clothes, foliage, and dec­o­ra­tions — that I wanted to bring out for a light­hearted, play­ful mood. Goddammit I love grad­ing; it’s become my favourite part of the process. You can set so many kinds of tones with colour alone.

The colours also led me to decide on using Beirut’s “Postcards from Italy” for the song, as the ukulele and horns empha­size that fes­tive feel­ing wonderfully.

I also got to work with Liz, a pho­tog­ra­pher who’s as fan­tas­tic1 as she is con­sid­er­ate. So far, she’s been the only one to say to me, “Tell me if I get in your way”, before I could say it to her. Guess who I’m refer­ring if any­one asks me for a wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher recommendation.

Sometimes I study the films of video­g­ra­phers I admire, and I’m inspired by their style but it never feels right when I try to achieve the same for my films. They rely on edit­ing to make their films inter­est­ing, and the films end up look­ing posed or unnat­ural. I’ve real­ized that I have to fol­low my own style — telling a story by cap­tur­ing the beauty in the sim­plic­ity — because that’s what I’ve been try­ing to do in words and pho­tos my whole life.

  1. She has a pre­view on her blog. [↑]
Date  August 24, 2011
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Categories  Random Video

Spanish Romance

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To be hon­est, I’d never heard of Spanish Romance until this year. Once I found out it was a clas­si­cal stan­dard, I started see­ing it on all these CDs by respected gui­tarists and com­pi­la­tion albums of “clas­si­cal greats”. It seems like any­one learn­ing clas­si­cal gui­tar will try to tackle it at some point, seduced by such an ele­gant melody. I have no clas­si­cal aspi­ra­tions, and even I fell for it.

I fig­ure I’d record this before I cut off my nails cause I’ve been grow­ing them for about two months1 and I’m com­pletely sick of them. They clack on my key­board and iPad, and I always have to be annoy­ingly care­ful about not break­ing them. Unfortunately, this song also sounds way bet­ter with some bright­ness to it when it’s not played with actual nylon strings; I’m still using a set of Silk and Steel, and there’s a cer­tain fat­ness to the sound when you really dig into them.

I’ve only had Larissa for six months now, but it feels more like six years. There’s so much famil­iar­ity in the wood and glossy curves. Even when I’m try­ing out a gui­tar sev­eral times the price of what she would cost, it never feels as nice.

  1. Although halfway through I cut them down to 1/4 length and lost a lot of growth cause I thought they were inter­fer­ing with my rest-stroke. Turns out the prob­lem was actu­ally in my tech­nique. Oops. [↑]
Date  May 31, 2011
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Categories  Random

a sketch of Shaded By Your Shadow

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So the iPad 2 is some­thing I bought last week, solely for the pur­pose of GarageBand. It’s pow­er­ful enough to be a sketch­pad where you can cre­ate musi­cal ideas, and because the instru­ments are touch-sensitive, it’s really fun to doo­dle and exper­i­ment. I don’t actu­ally have a bass or piano or drums, so the extra instru­men­ta­tion is pretty handy too.

Over the week­end I made this sketch of Shaded By Your Shadow as I was fig­ur­ing my way around the soft­ware. It’s always been one of my favourite songs by Shane; the title alone evokes this image of lying in the grass on a warm day, with someone’s hair drift­ing in the haze of their out­line above you.

I haven’t lost myself this much in a project (small as it was) in a long time. I had to fig­ure out the roles of instru­ments I’ve never played before, per­cus­sion being a par­tic­u­larly weak point of mine cause I rarely pay atten­tion to it when I’m lis­ten­ing to music. There are a lot of synth instru­ments included with GarageBand, so I tried to give it an 80s synth-pop sound. Everything was done right on the iPad, includ­ing vocals which were recorded using the built-in microphone.

I still have to learn about mix­ing and pro­duc­tion and what­not (and since I don’t have any mon­i­tors, I’m com­pletely blind when set­ting the var­i­ous lev­els), but I was happy as punch just to be able to fig­ure out the soft­ware and process. It really is it’s own cre­ative process when mak­ing a full band arrange­ment for a song, a puz­zle in it’s own right, because you can start with an idea or motif on any instru­ment and there are so many direc­tions you can go from there.

Date  May 19, 2011
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Categories  Random

between the river and the ravens I'm fed

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Consider the ravens. They do not sow or reap, they have no store­room or barn; yet God feeds them.

—Luke 12:24

It’s start­ing to get uncom­fort­ably busy. There’s always some­one else to visit, another per­son to catch up with. Projects have a way of find­ing me too; I’ll hear a song and decide that I need to make an arrange­ment, or some­one will approach me for a web­site or video when they’re pur­su­ing dreams of their own.

dinner at the Trolley's

Me and Trolley and Steph and Aaron and not you. I win.

(I have yet to get a pic­ture of Trolley with a full glass of beer.)

It’s the same way when it comes to fig­ur­ing out what to eat lately. I open an empty fridge a half dozen times, each time think­ing I’ll find a hid­den cache of food that wasn’t there before, then some­one will call me for dinner.

I’ve been for­tu­nate enough to jam with a few peo­ple too, includ­ing Heather, who pulled out her cello for the first time in her adult­hood to give me root notes on the base­line. One draw of the bow across those strings has con­vinced me that I want one of my own; the tones are rich and meaty, some­thing you feel through the entire instru­ment, and espe­cially the ten­sion of the rib­bon (and I thought the gui­tar was tac­tile). We even con­vinced Sergey to pick up some mal­lets and strike the keys of a glock­en­spiel with us, the first time in his life he’s ever played an instrument.

I’m look­ing for­ward to the Fall, when I have noth­ing else booked. Part of me wishes I could take a year off and lock myself in a cot­tage some­where and work on my own projects with­out inter­rup­tion, but I don’t mind so much right now. Luckily, the work is always ful­fill­ing, regard­less of whether it’s for me or not, because so often I get to col­lab­o­rate with such won­der­fully cre­ative peo­ple. I just need to ride the del­i­cate line between dis­trac­tion and over-stimulation.

Date  May 9, 2011
Tags 
Categories  Daily Life Photos

Sarah and Michael — Wedding Day

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I’ve been bleed­ing for a big project, some­thing to really throw myself into. Luckily, wed­dings are as big as they come, and at 70.43 GB of footage taken, this wed­ding was the biggest by far.

It was also the first Italian wed­ding I’ve expe­ri­enced, and there was noth­ing more inter­est­ing than observ­ing the cus­toms. It’s a very phys­i­cal cul­ture, with lots of hug­ging, kiss­ing, and firm pats on shoul­ders. And some­how every­one is a nat­ural dancer. How did every­one know to hold hands in equally sized cir­cles and start mov­ing in the same direc­tion? How did every­one know when to stop hold­ing hands and start clap­ping1? How did you every­one known to step in to touch the groom and mother at the same time?

This is a per­fect exam­ple of how video takes over the lim­i­ta­tions of still pho­tog­ra­phy. A lot of cama­raderie and inti­macy and con­fi­dence only come out when motion is involved, because it’s all in how peo­ple move and inter­act. Trying to cap­ture a bride eat­ing cake out of her cleav­age just isn’t pos­si­ble with a sin­gle frame.

This was a very spe­cial project for me, and I put so much love into this film, from the camera-work to the edit­ing to the grad­ing to the music. Over three hours of footage was care­fully stripped away to cre­ate this five minute story. Every moment mat­ters, every frame counts.

Sarah and Mike are so happy with the final prod­uct that they’ve now decided to send a DVD of this video out to all the guests in lieu of thank-you cards. For a wed­ding of 450 peo­ple, this is no small con­sid­er­a­tion. When I first met them, I knew they were going to be a fan­tas­tic cou­ple to work with because they were super nice and made me feel very com­fort­able. They also gave me full cre­ative con­trol, which is always the most impor­tant thing for me as an artist.

Production notes beneath the cut

  1. It reminded me of this time I saw an opera in Budapest. When the cur­tain came down and the audi­ence started applaud­ing, every­one even­tu­ally clapped in uni­son and didn’t speed up. North Americans all clap in an amor­phous din, but over in Hungary it’s like they were all clap­ping to the tim­ing of a con­duc­tor. [↑]
Date  April 28, 2011
Tags 
Categories  Random Video

Tiana + Molly (Glidetrack demo)

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I pur­chased a half-metre Glidetrack Hybrid to get some slow dolly shots but with a much, much more portable sys­tem. Smooth hor­i­zon­tal cam­era move­ments can add a bit of depth to any footage, though the effect can’t be used too often.

So I’ve been prac­tic­ing with this new piece of equip­ment for the last month, look­ing for peo­ple to film, and luck­ily Tiana is always will­ing to vol­un­teer with one of her off­spring. You can see the Glidetrack shots at 12 sec­onds (the zoom in) and 48 sec­onds (the hor­i­zon­tal track).

It’s an extremely chal­leng­ing piece of equip­ment to use, cer­tainly not some­thing con­ducive to can­did shoot­ing. Things like expo­sure, focus, and com­po­si­tion change as you’re mov­ing the cam­era from one end of the rail to the other, and sin­gle mis­take in any one of those aspects will ruin a shot, so all those things gen­er­ally need to be care­fully planned. On top of that, sim­ply mov­ing the cam­era smoothly takes a lot of prac­tice, as there’s a cer­tain amount of fric­tion in the bear­ings, and you need to bal­ance that with the move­ment speed you’re look­ing for. At only half a metre (the short­est length you can pur­chase), the shots all tend to be slow and lin­ger­ing so you don’t run out of rail.

The per­cent­age of keep­ers isn’t great (I find it takes me about three takes to get it right), but when it works, the effect is very nice.

Date  April 17, 2011
Tags 
Categories  Video

so I had to go out and find love of another kind

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All I tend to do nowa­days is tin­ker on the gui­tar or uke. It’s nice to have projects, to be able to exper­i­ment and explore and scream. Music is such a won­der­ful medium.

And the small rit­u­als1 — mois­tur­iz­ing cal­louses before bed, fil­ing nails, tun­ing, clean­ing, adjust­ing the action — always bring a com­fort­ing famil­iar­ity when every­thing is per­fect. Not to men­tion that won­der­fully juicy feel­ing when hit­ting cer­tain chords just right.

Larissa

 

Ever since I left my Tai Chi stu­dio, I’ve been look­ing for a hobby to throw myself into. Something just as com­plex and slow to mas­ter. It’s nice to feel like I’m improv­ing myself some­how, and the best part is I don’t need a part­ner or a sub­ject or any­one else.

  1. Ironic, me being a Taoist. [↑]
Date  April 6, 2011
Tags 
Categories  Daily Life Photos

Arrows with no target

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I don’t view my projects the same way any­more. I used to work towards a goal, an idea of what I wanted to achieve. But more recently I stopped car­ing about the end result, prob­a­bly due to this new per­spec­tive on…every­thing.

It’s a strange jux­ta­po­si­tion of know­ing that what you’re doing is ulti­mately insignif­i­cant, and find­ing enjoy­ment in doing it any­way. Like a child stack­ing a pile of blocks, only to knock them down.

The wikipedia arti­cle on wu wei explains feel­ing this bet­ter than I can:

The goal for wu wei is to get out of your own way, so to speak. This is like when you are play­ing an instru­ment and if you start think­ing about play­ing the instru­ment, then you will get in your own way and inter­fere with your own play­ing. It is aim­less action, because if there was a goal that you need to aim at and hit, then you will develop anx­i­ety about this goal.

Zhuangzi made a point of this, where he writes about an archer who at first didn’t have any­thing to aim at. When there was noth­ing to aim at, the archer was happy and con­tent with his being. He was prac­tic­ing wu wei. But, then he set up a tar­get and “got in his own way.” He was going against the Tao and the nat­ural course of things by hav­ing to hit that goal.

(This also reminds me of a verse from Leonard Cohen’s True Love Leaves No Traces: “Through win­dows in the dark/The chil­dren come, the chil­dren go/Like arrows with no tar­gets/Like shack­les made of snow.)

Nowadays, I do what I feel like doing and don’t stress out about not fin­ish­ing a project, cause I know I’ll feel like work­ing on it another day. It leaves me more loose ends, but I don’t mind. Luckily, I love cre­at­ing things. Trying dif­fer­ent medi­ums. New ways of express­ing myself.

Date  May 27, 2010
Tags 
Categories  Thoughts

The Dawning: Rachel CD Release Concert

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When Rachel Beausoleil started work­ing on her lat­est album, she approached me about design­ing the art­work. We sat down and threw around some ideas before she even started record­ing, but didn’t come up with any­thing solid because I didn’t have a sound to go on. All I knew was that it was a med­ley of songs, not like her last album where the songs fol­lowed a theme.

One day I came home to find a record­ing of the album in my mail­box, yet to be mas­tered. She named the album after the epony­mous track, The Dawning, which is a jazz arrange­ment of the famous song Aquarius, a per­sonal anthem of hers.

The Dawning artwork front

She gave me her notes soon after, so I put on the album and gave it a good lis­ten, feel­ing a cer­tain clar­ity from her sound. It made me think about dawn, and space, and sun­rises, and hot colours, so I incor­po­rated those ele­ments when lay­ing out the text, as well as some bokeh to give an off-focus glimmer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Date  October 24, 2009
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Categories  Photos Random

Natalie MacLean — Why Subscribe?

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Natalie MacLean — award-winning wine writer, speaker, judge, and author of the book “Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass” — com­mis­sioned me to make a video to sell sub­scrip­tions to her wine newsletter.

This was really fun to do, as Natalie is very funny, pleas­ant, and nat­ural, both in per­son and in front of the camera.

Shot with a Canon Vixia HF100, and edited in Final Cut Pro. Soundtrack Pro was used for audio edit­ing, and Magic Bullet used for filters.

Date  October 2, 2009
Tags 
Categories  Random Video

Rachel Beausoleil at the NAC

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A demo reel I made for Rachel Beausoleil, using footage I shot of her jazz vocal per­for­mance at the NAC Fourth Stage, as well as snip­pets of an inter­view I did with her. As a way of get­ting more expo­sure for future gigs, she asked for some video that she could shop around to dif­fer­ent venues. I agreed to make this demo reel for her in return for some tick­ets to the show for me and my friends.

It was a won­der­ful con­cert in an inti­mate set­ting. The reper­toire was quite var­ied — from waltz to Bossa nova to bal­lad — but all songs were per­formed as a jazz inter­pre­ta­tions. The setlist included Aquarius by The Fifth Dimension, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, and Evangeline by Isabelle Pierre.

Of spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance is that the per­for­mance was on Rachel’s 40th birth­day. She had planned the con­cert over a year ago as a come­back after hav­ing two kids and giv­ing up her time for them.

I can now embed videos in HD after acquir­ing a Vimeo Plus account; they look oh-so-sexy, and even bet­ter in full-screen.

One of the high­lights of the night was Tom Posner’s bass solo dur­ing Caravan (a clas­sic Duke Ellington big-band piece) clock­ing in at almost two min­utes. You can see how sur­prised Rachel is when Tom loses him­self in the music and keeps going on this great flurry of notes. This solo is some kind of awe­some that I can’t even describe.

Date  October 28, 2008
Tags 
Categories  Random Video
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