Time to take a breath! Time to come back to the real world, step away from the camera and video editing software for a moment. Time to finally post a blog update.Most regular readers of the blog know that May and June can be some of the crazier months for me, what with so many video projects hitting at once. As it's been a while since I have posted, let me do a quick recap. Over the last 2 months, here's what's been on the schedule:
1. Filming the Colorado documentary: I already posted on the filming process and a quick trailer for the upcoming film, which is finally starting the editing phase this week.
2. The "Sound of Music" performance DVDs: To help finance my Mom's documentary film, and since I was there anyway, I offered to film my mom's last musical, not as part of the documentary film, but for the performance, for people to buy to remember the actual play. A simple guy would just pop a camera on a tripod, press record, and burn out the results to disk. But me being me, I don't do things the easy way. I had to film all three nights from multiple camera angles and then put together a "performance" not from one night, but taking the best from all 3 nights and combining them into one. That translates into big workloads, and a fast turnaround as we promised to have finished DVDs delivered to them prior to their graduation just 2 weeks after the performance.
3. Marist Senior Tribute: A HUGE project for me, taking a ton of time. This is a special tribute DVD developed for the graduating class of Marist High School. There is an interesting story for me to tell in conjunction with this project, but I will save that for when I can post bits of the video online, whereas now, that could hurt DVD sales. So for now, suffice it to say that the project took a lot of time over the last 3 months, but the huge order of DVDs was dropped off yesterday.. and I can finally breath again.
5. Marist Graduation: Although its for the same school and related to the graduating class, it's a completely different project: filming the graduation ceremony (requiring multiple cameras and a lot of coordination) and then editing and producing the DVDs.
6. Camp Wilani DVDs: Every other year, Little Calvin's school, and I mean the ENTIRE school spends a week at a local summer camp for outdoor school. The experience is very rewarding for the kids (even when freak, intense, severe storms cause the evacuation of camp one day) and of course that means that our cameras are rolling, filming the week. This project has a FAST turn around, as the camp is held shortly before the end of school, and the disks must be produced in time to get them to parents before summer break starts. Again, my wife works a lot of hours keeping up on the editing, and I work the other details. I'd say we make a very good team!
7. Business projects: In my free time (ha!) I also produced a video for a local engineering firm to use to help sell one of their high tech products. Due to the specifics on the contract and the proprietary nature of the shoot, I can't go into details, but.. suffice it to say it was a fun shoot, and interesting video to put together as a break from looking at high school or elementary school students.
8. "The Great Pine Cone War": Finally, in a bit of insanity, I somehow agreed to help our local scout troop earn their cinematography merit badge. I joined them on an overnight camp-out to direct them in the filming of their movie, necessary for earning the badge. Sure, it was a lot of fun returning to my boy scout roots and spending a day chasing teenagers through the forest with a camera in hand, dousing them with fake blood, as well as a number of creative ideas. I also worked with them to get the film edited.
So there.. 8 big projects in 2 months. Anyone wondering why I have grossly neglected my blog, Facebook postings, and e-mails? There you go! Now it's time to enjoy my summer.. oh wait.. I have more to edit! And since I have no shortage of work to be done, anyone guess what I proposed to Little Calvin as something that might be fun to do this summer? Yup.. video production! Every day! For his blog we are doing a video diary of "almost" every day of his summer vacation, requiring nightly editing sessions together. So far we've made our own episode of Wipeout, survived the death of his beloved first pet, and had fun coming up with new ways to present each day. You can see the episodes here, and remember we are attempting to post each week day, so check back frequently.
So that's the latest from the Calvin household. Now that the "strict deadline" projects have been completed I will be able to return to more regular updates, Growing Up Calvin features and crazy family stories and adventures.
Now, I can finally scratch "update blog" off the "to do" list... Back to the video editing..
