You can find and download a copy of these photos at flickr: HERE.

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Steve’s picture deserves to stand alone because, after hearing about Dan Lyons from my blog a few days ago, he cut and donated his hair to Locks for Love.

Steve cut his hair for Locks of Love.

I’m really enjoying my experience with the new lens. I’ve never had a telephoto zoom so I am learning where I need to position myself (usually pretty far away) to the subject to get the shots I’m looking for. It is pretty heavy but I also have a Manfrotto monopod that I’ll use for it on any wedding jobs, etc. to take the weight off of my arms.

The flight from yesterday was incredible. My best climb was at 6:30pm! Everyone launched after about 5pm. It’s crazy how late in the day it was. I was cruising at cloud base (6,000′) towards Chattanooga for several miles before I turned back and did some aerobatics. It was enough that I could hardly lift my head up when I landed, my neck was so tired from holding my head up during the aerobatics because of the G’s I was pulling. I did wingovers all the way down from about 4,500′.

I’ve started to spin my glider, get a little more over the top on wingovers, and am really enjoying early morning speed runs very close to the treetops (watch my shadow in the video).

The video was made using my gorillapod on my keel with my Canon 7D, and another mount that I set up using a fisheye on my Canon HF100, see a picture of that mount on my other blog. I’m not too keen on fisheyes because they distort the image so much it makes trees that I’m inches away from look like they’re many feet away, so it’s hard to get a grasp on what is really happening when you watch things through a fisheye.

I will be moving soon so this may be my last hang gliding-related video for a while, hope you enjoy.

I just rotated this image from the video so you can see what it looks like if the horizon is oriented properly to my position.

So we decided to try for Mount Elbert which is the tallest mountain in Colorado at 14,433′. We spent the night close to the trailhead in the well established camping area of the San Isabel National Forest. We woke up early to start up the standard route, the Northeast Ridge.

It was beautiful hiking, up until we were postholing through snow near the treeline at 12,000′. It was really slow going through that area. Carson even resorted to ‘ninja rolling’ to get through the terrain, which means he looked like he was practicing the stop, drop, and roll. Punching through the snow with almost every step, up to your hip, was exhausting and felt like you were falling through a trap door every time because it happened so quickly.

The rest of the hike was gorgeous. We only saw two other people all day. On the way down I decided to try some glissading which you can see in the video was a ton of fun (and by my crazy laugh). I think it probably took about 9 hours of hiking roundtrip, including rests.

We also went and saw the Great Sand Dune National Park and we also headed over to Golden, CO and I got to check out the flying launch there, which is also named Lookout Mountain. Wish I had brought my gear for flying, next time I will. We also got to see JB Smoove in stand up in Denver, he’s probably most famous for THIS scene in a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode.

The crew with Elbert in the background

Follow the yellow br... I mean sign

Carson trying to get out of a posthole and Eric mocking him by walking away.

Just out of the treeline.

Carson.

Eric.

Summit.

Leaving the summit in our dust.

Shortly after this steeper section we started glissading

Watch your step.

BJ Herring climbing out.

Liftoff.

Great Sand Dunes National Park

To vote for this video go HERE.

I called in a favor from a local actor, Mark Murray, to help me out and we took about an hour and a half on a Sunday afternoon to film it. I already had everything storyboarded out so it wasn’t too complicated. The hard part came with the post production, which is always a struggle to make your ideas actually work. That is especially true because I was pressed for time to do the post production, because after we filmed on Sunday then I went to Colorado for a week and had just enough time to finish this before it was due Monday (I’ll blog about the CO trip soon).

Mark Murray was nice enough to put his face on a dirty sidewalk for the production of this video - Thanks Mark!

It was a great learning opportunity and gained a lot of experience with trying to motion track things and also just more experience with the Canon 7D and rolling shutter issues. Whether I place in this contest or not (grand prize is $10,000) I enjoyed the process, as I always do.

All the special effects were done using Adobe After Effects and used a combination of the built-in tracker and the Mocha tracker to track in the special effects. That was the hardest part of this whole project and I think I was mildly successful with the end result, but as I mentioned I did learn a lot. The live action effects are from Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2 DVD and I really enjoy working with their products.

Action Essentials 2 at work on a downtown building

I did a little location scouting way before I even wrote the story board and landed on the location next to the Tivoli Theater in downtown Chattanooga. It was a nice backdrop with the Tivoli sign, and there was a large building across the street so I could blow that up (see above picture). But the key parts were to have a building with a window, so I could put in my own tv there for the news broadcast, and then also have an alleyway for the dog to come out of. Of course, I had to figure out a way to include my dogs in the film, so I thought it would add some chaotic atmosphere to have a dog running with leash dragging behind it.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy it. It was fun to make and I really appreciate Mark’s help on it too!

Support Dr. Potter, his research, and what’s best about Sewanee with a gift to the Sewanee Annual Fund today! Go to GiveToSewanee.com to make a gift online or mail a check to 735 University Ave., Sewanee, TN 37383. Call 800.379.1179 with questions. Thanks! Our year ends June 30th!

The winners are selected by a split of 49% public vote and 51% judges votes. The two winners are flown to Cannes, France for a week to compete in a film competition. Other interesting characteristics of this contest were you had to be 18-28 to enter and you couldn’t use any music. That last one was tough since music can play such a crucial role in videos, especially ones with emotional subject matter. This one is for WaterAid.org who wants you to sign a petition trying to get world leaders to stick to what they signed 10 years ago, the Millenium Development Goals. At the current rate they’ll be about 200 years late achieving the sanitation standards they signed on for. So this petition is important, don’t let them drop this issue.

So my idea was to try and play to the fact we couldn’t have music, so I tied in sounds with the issue. It’s tough just to hear someone blabber on sometimes, so to have those sound fx under my voice helps break up the monotony I hope. I am happy with it considering I made it within 48 hours of reading the brief for the contest. Half the battle is coming up with an idea, or ideas, and then picking which one is the best, and then sitting there and thinking, ‘okay this is going to take a while’ and now I have to actually do it. But that personal challenge is also part of the fun. I’ll be interested to see how many people actually entered this contest because of the 48 hour restriction. My other idea was to actually film with my camera and not do animations, but that meant going to several locations (for the alternative idea), ask favors of the location people, and maybe try and ask a favor of a friend to help. Instead, I just sat in front of my computer and cranked this out.

I did everything in After Effects CS4 (I really want to get that CS5 upgrade) except for the ending logo animation with the water drop. That was done in Cinema 4D and I actually downloaded a trial version of RealFlow just to have an excuse to use it and see what it’s like (It costs $1,000!). That animation could have been a lot nicer, but I had to turn things off like Global Illumination and certain aspects of the materials like transparency in the water because it was taking forever to render. After almost 3 hours it had gotten through a ‘first pass’ on about 30 frames (out of 250). So I had to ratchet down the quality just to get it rendered.

The After Effects stuff was pretty straight forward, but tedious. The biggest thing was just trying to come up with some kind of style for it that would work throughout the video. I think it’s a little too grungy for my taste (that’s why I shattered it when it says “You make a difference”), but you can tweak and think and rethink yourself into oblivion with stuff like that, and that wasn’t going to work for the 48 hour deadline. I did enjoy using Red Giant Trapcode’s Particular 2 plug-in. That’s how I created the stick figure scene. I’m familiar with Particular (that’s how I made the cloud finger-tracer effect in my HP video) so it was fun to get my hands on it again, but I wish I had more time to play with it, I think I could have made that piece of the animation bit prettier (see the “4,000″ photo above).

One thing that snagged me for a while was it was taking forever to preview that short sequence and I couldn’t figure it out, then I realized I had selected “Random – Play Once” instead of “Random – Still Frame” for the layer I was using to populate that crowd of stick people. So every frame it was having to repopulate each 4,000 particle, when what I want it to do was produce 4,000 and then just stay there, which was the “Random – Still Frame” option. Enough of that technical stuff . . .

I forgot to mention I only started working on it Saturday afternoon because I wanted to fly in the morning. Then I stayed up all night except for a 2 hour nap and worked on it. I started to go a little crazy when I couldn’t nail the voice over stuff. I had to keep saying “like a toilet” over and over. I still don’t think it works in the video, but I had to stop trying to get it just right because I was going crazy repeating “like a toilet” over and over. You never realize how hard it is to copy your own voice and match voiceovers together, it’s something you never think about, but is the reason getting voiceovers in one or two takes quickly will have the same tone and pitch in your voice.

• Overview (above, others are below)
• About
• Environment
• Wine

The music used are instrumentals created by Ry Cumming and I really enjoyed getting to hear them over and over as I edited these videos together, very soothing and beautiful work.

I posted the Overview video above, but I encourage you to check out the other ones as well. I think my favorite is the Environment one because of the skiing footage I took. That was just a fun day, and challenging to be carrying around my Canon 7D zipped up in my ski jacket and trying to ski and film at the same time.

Lane and Ryan, the creators of Miracle One, are both great guys and I hope everyone gets to taste their wine soon. I know for you local Chattanooga people, that it is being sold at the Vine, next to Greenlife. Also, if it’s not sold near you, you can request the store you buy from to start carrying it.

If you’re new to the wine world then you’ll want to check out Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s the official wine guru of our times. Check out Wine Library TV to see the videos he posts regularly about wine.

ABOUT:




ENVIRONMENT:




WINE:

I want to thank Ashley and Isaiah for letting me have their time and patience to make this, as well as, Angela and Jen for helping with the voiceover work.

It was fun to make and I hope you enjoy!

You can give to Sewanee by going to this link: www.GiveToSewanee.com. Their goal is to have as much class participation as possible, which means even giving a little bit helps. I know I will be before June 30th, when their year ends.