Mexico City Wedding

We traveled to Mexico City to shoot Amaya & Alberto's wedding. I met my former shooting partner and wife to be, Rachel, there and we shot this wedding together. It had been two years since we shot weddings together and it was so great to be working together again. We split up for the Pre-Ceremony and Rachel went with the groom and I with the bride.


Amayo & Alberto Pre Ceremony from PlayaWeddings on Vimeo.

Melanie & Ryan's Pre Ceremony

The Pre Ceremony took place at the Iberostar Lindo. I thought it was a pretty intense "dress going-on" so I chose one of my favorite instrumental tracks. I always prefer to use songs of the couple's choosing. Melanie and Ryan chose some great songs and I used them all but there was a lot of coverage and I filled in with instrumental music. It was fortunate that I was able to use lots of the live instrumental music from the musicians that day. This track was not live, it's from Ambulance Ltd.


Melanie and Ryan's PreCeremony from PlayaWeddings on Vimeo.

Sheila & Uri's Villa Wedding

I put this song "Mr. Blue Sky" on a page of recommended songs because I saw it in another wedding video and wanted to use it. I was excited when Sheila and Uri were the first to pick it.



Sheila & Uri Wedding Day Edit from PlayaWeddings and Vimeo.

The Balance Band at Xcaret

The Balance Band is available for weddings in the Riviera Maya, see http://www.balancelabanda.com

This is at the theater at Xcaret. One of the greatest reception halls in all of Mexico.



The Balance Band at Xcaret from PlayaWeddings and Vimeo.

I'm a Lance Acord fan

I've been editing weddings from a busy spring wedding season in the Riviera Maya. When I take breaks I've been watching DVDs in my hammock. Buffalo 66 really blew me away with the cinematography. The rich color, the great angles and perspectives, and great use of a super shallow depth of field. So I looked it up on imdb.com and learned that it had been shot on reversal stock - "Gallo decided to shoot on reversal stock (the equivalent of color transparency film - expensive both to buy and process), without even knowing if it was going to be developed." This explained the rich color. It really is unique and beautiful. Knowing the cinematographer is responsible for this I found out it was Lance Acord. I looked him up on IDMB and found out he was the cinematographer for Lost in Translation. Another movie that just blew me away with the richness of the shots. I'm definitely a Lance Acord fan and I'll be sure to keep an eye out for his upcoming films. The cinematographer is the unheralded hero of Hollywood.

There's so much to see in movies. Even if the plot and/or dialog is weak I can always look at and appreciate the way it's shot. What the person behind the camera has done with what's in front of the camera. Elephant is a great example of this. Really beautiful, long shots, but sometimes hard to hang with.

I see these movies as moving photographs. I find it really fun to divorce myself from the standard hooks of the plot and see them them as art. Then when the plot sneaks in through the back door and grabs me, these are the movies I love.

Melanie and Matt's Pre-Ceremony

I have a new internet connection and it's impossible for me to upload movies. I don't know what the problem is, but in the meantime here is a great pre-ceremony sequence. Wow! it's been a busy season. I shoot my last wedding tomorrow but I have quite a bit of editing to do. Last October I was worried that I didn't have many bookings. Be careful what you (I) wish for. This summer I plan to attend the Wedding and Event Videographers Expo in Vegas. My fourth year, it's absolutely essential for staying current with technology and for inspiration. Every year the bar gets raised for quality in my industry. Enjoy this clip from the RIU Palace.






Melanie and Matt's Pre-Ceremony from PlayaWeddings and Vimeo.

Video Mixbot Experiments

Video Mixbot - Movie Remix 1 on Vimeo

I've been experimenting with a program called Isadora.It's an object oriented programming tool for video processing. I've created a program that detects the relative volume of music, when the volume enters the top of the range it sends a trigger. This volume spike often happens on the drum hits so it makes it a halfway decent rhythm approximator. I divide these triggers are divided by 4, 8, 16, etc. to break them down into measures as opposed to beats. In this clip, every 8th trigger sends the video clip to a random spot.

The effect is to re-edit the film to the rhythm of the music. The film is broken into four parts so that it jumps around every 1/4th of the film, this maintains some narrative thread. In addition, the speed of the clip is directly tied to the relative volume. Louder passages go faster, quieter parts go slower.

My idea was to provide different ways to present content in social places like bars. The computer can be loaded up with whatever movies you like and it can play continuously, synched with an external sound source.

This clip is from the film is "For All Mankind," an excellent documentary about the Apollo missions. The music is Air, the cuts are all generated by the music.



Video Mixbot - Movie Remix 2 on Vimeo

Same concept as previous clip.

Here the first half of the clip is footage from "The Wizard of Oz." Can't miss with those images. The second is the Beatles movie "A Hard Day's Night." I love the cinematography of this film. It is beautifully shot and really dynamic. It's well suited for the auto-remix application.



Video Mixbot - Graphics 1 on Vimeo

This is a different module of the same program. The clips here are drawn from a bin of graphic clips that I've collected, some are mine, others I found on the net. There are two layers of video and the triggers are mapped to slightly different parameters for each layer.

When I go out I see big screen TVs playing ESPN with the sound off and the captions on and I'm always annoyed when I catch myself staring up and reading the screen. It just seems like such a strange phenomenon. So I created this to utilize these screens in more creative and interesting way. This is what I do when I don't have wedding work.