Category Archives: Video

Channing Way Video

A colleague of mine hired me to shoot some video of a new refurbishment of a Berkeley house that was being converted into apartments. It presented some issues in that it was unfurnished and had very little light of its own. However, the budget didn’t call for a lot of lighting and all three units needed to be completed in a day. So I took a single LED fixture and my fluid head tripod and just did the minimum in movements to capture the spaces.

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New Tower in San Francisco

Equity Residential built this 40-story multi-family residence to capture some of the explosive growth in San Francisco. A colleague of mine wanted to get some drone video of the new building to augment his stills for the client. He and the client we’re interested mostly in getting the view from the tower to the Bay Bridge but we got quite a bit more.

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Artwork at the new Warm Springs BART Station

My photography colleague: Russell Abraham invited me to shoot video of the art installation at the new Warm Springs BART station in Fremont. Catherine Widgery is a renowned public sculpture artist with over 40 site specific installations in Canada and the United States. In this location, she created semi-translucent glass panels with tinted cells that abstractly integrate with and reflect the surrounding environment.

I incorporated some drone footage with standard video and animated some stills from Russell to create this video.

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Video for Architecture

More and more of my clients have been asking for video on their architectural shoots. I have been shooting video for years but it was always separate from the architectural still work. Fortunately, the equipment has progressed to the point where it is reasonably affordable. As a matter of fact, I now shoot both the stills and video on the same camera.
Video offers that sense of immediacy and presences that stills just don’t convey. Not only do objects in the frame have motion but the camera movement gives an ever changing perspective on the space.
Internet broadband now easily supports large format video and having them on your site actually increases your organic Google ranking -they love video as rich media content.
Below is a sample we did on an Olson Kundig remodel of a classic Mid-Century Modern house in the Berkeley Hills.

Please contact me for more information about architectural video.

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Hero Video of Russell Abraham

My colleague and studio mate hired me to make a hero video for his website update. We shot an interview in the studio and I employed his images as a pan and scan for imagery. We also added some footage that I got during one of our jobs together.

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The New Green Screen

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I had shot on green screen years ago and had a very negative experience.  The process of removing or matte background is called Keying and the earlier versions of this function in Premiere Pro were less than flawless. I had a terrible time cleaning up the matte and had an almost impossible task of cleaning up the Spill. The Spill is those parts of your image that reflect the color of the background and although green is a very good background to remove, it’s not a flattering color on people. I did manage to get it done but not without a great deal of work. From that point on I shied away from green screen processing.

I recently had a client that was very interested in a hero video that we could shoot in a short time period, in the limited confines of my small studio.  He stressed the importance that although the content was just him talking, that he didn’t want it to be just another boring talking head video against a static background.

I discovered that the team for Premiere Pro had added a new tool to the keying suite called Ultra Keying.  It does as it is named and created pretty flawless mattes. The new tools that are included in this function includes a Spill Suppression slider which is what was missing from previous editions. This enabled me to finally render a motion background that I had possessed for year and though I may never use.

Both the client and I were very impressed with the results and I’ll not shy away from the green screen again.

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SORAA’s New Snap System

SORAA wanted a completely different look for their second video. With a limited amount of time to complete before their big show, they wanted a more graphical, edgy and snappy video to show off their latest addition to the product line. They’ve invented magnetic filters that attach to the front of their new lamps that affect both the shape of the beam and render various color shifts. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time or budget to produce too much-advanced animation and as will all new products, the prototype came in at the last minute. Still, it was fun to do something a little different.

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SORAA at Kwan Hemni

SORAA is an inventor and manufacturer of high end LED lamps. Their lamps are remarkable for their color spectrum and beam pattern. In fact we shot this promo for them using their lamps for fill as well. We were able to shoot this spot at the wonderful Marin home of Sylvia Kwan and Denis Hemni who are the partners at the architecture firm of the same name.

This video was shot entirely with my new Canon 5D MK III.canon-eos-5d-mark-iii-jjc It features a new, low noise, sensor and improved record times of up to 29 minutes.

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Joseph Gary Kickstart 2

Joseph Gary Cellars decided to try an interview format during their crush of the grapes for their tempranillo. We did this two camera shoot in one of the empty coolers at Rockwall.

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Contour Energy Systems

This video was produced for The Gallagher Group Communications and Contour Energy Systems. Factory footage was provided by Miranda Mar of Beltane Pictures.

Video Duration: 4:02 minutes

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