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!

A month or two ago, after a Treetopper’s board meeting and a quick sled run at Henson’s, I stopped in Chattanooga to take some timelapse photos while the sun was setting. The park scene is like condensed people watching, I like seeing different things each time I watch it.

The clouds and the night sky were recently shot in my front yard (thanks Eric W. for calling me to tell me about the cool clouds), and the parks in Chattanooga are Coolidge and Renaissance Park (where the hill is). That hill is pretty cool. Kids, and adults, go there and somehow cardboard manifests itself and people use it to sled down the hill – very fun to go see and try out for yourself.

When I went with a couple people we lined up a row of cardboard from the top to the bottom of the hill and slid down that instead of trying to use the cardboard as a sled, we used it as a slip n slide, without the water.

The music is by Cat Stevens, the song is “Father & Son.”

I hope to do more of these in the future.

Well, I’ve been working pretty hard, or should I say obsessively, on this new website. At first, I didn’t think I could handle the challenge. I came close to throwing in the towel and go crawling back to the easy-to-use Blogger. But, WordPress seems to be worth the effort and it is definately more powerful, but there is a bit of a learning curve. A big thanks goes to Lucas Howell for helping me work through some code/design issues!

I will be keeping the blogger website since it has all my old posts, and the one disadvantage of going to a premium theme in wordpress is that there’s no easy way to import all my old blogger posts. If I just used a run-of-the-mill wordpress theme then it wouldn’t be a problem, but the reason I switched to wordpress was that I could get a slick design, but that slick design is not compatible with importing Blogger archives.

What I really like is how I can display ‘featured content’ on the slider on the home page and organize things into categories. Want to just quickly get to videos? You can click the ‘Videos’ button at the top or side, or go to the home page and flip through the slider at the top. On blogger, you would have to find a video by scrolling through every single post before you got to it, so this is much better.

To the right you will see these three icons:

You can subscribe with an RSS feed reader like Google Reader (orange button), you can subscribe by getting emails of each post (green button), and/or you can follow me on Twitter (blue button).

These are the three different ways you can stay updated with my posts on this blog. That way you don’t have to constantly check my blog for when it is updated, you’ll be told when it is, so you only visit when you know there are new posts or content. This is much easier than bookmarking this website and having to check every so often to see if there’s anything new. By subscribing you’ll be told when there’s something new, so no wasted time checking!

Chattanooga - on North Shore of walking bridge looking towards the city and Lookout Mountain behind it.

I caught a little time lapse photography yesterday near Coolidge Park as an excuse to play with my Canon 7d . I used a remote timer to set the intervals of the shutter release at about once every 3 seconds.

I put the ISO down to 100 and the aperature as high as I could get it, maybe 32, then the shutter as slow as I could make it, maybe 1/30. I did the former two so I could get the shutter to be as slow as possible. Everything I had read said to try and ‘drag the shutter.’ Luckily, it was overcast yesterday and that helped, otherwise I think I would have needed a neutral density filter that I didn’t have.

Below you can see the Joby Gorillapod at work. I went for a speed run yesterday at Henson’s Gap after the board meeting, and put my camcorder (Canon HF100) out on the sprog with the gorillapod, but I also counter-weighted it on the other wing.

It didn’t affect my flying characteristics, but when I flared it favored and leaned toward that wingtip the camera was on. The trouble of putting it on the sprog is that there is a little play in it, the sprog rotates lengthwise, so the camera was getting shaken alot, looking up and down with each little bump.

It was great fun though – I flew really close to the treetops and was in ground effect on landing for quite a while. There was so much shaking I don’t know if any of the footage will be useful. We’ll see.

This was the outer sprog, and I counter weighted it with some ankle weight on the other wing, this image doesn't show the tie down I had as well.