Me and My Life

Bleh. Back to vlogging. For all intents and purposes this blog has been semi-hijacked by Jen Proctor for a class I'm taking from her this semester. This particular project was a throw-together "self-portrait" for another class. It's not really "me" but it is the story of my life at the moment. Good news is. The vlog is re-activated!

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Take the step, make the difference

This is a short promotional vid I did for Grand Valley's Alternative Breaks program of which I am a site leader this year. If your interest is sparked and you're not at GVSU I know U of M has the largest program in the country (though our reign as program of the year is now) and MSU as an unsanctioned but still fairly big program as well. Check out alternativebreaks.org to see if your school has one. Now that I'm done plaguing you with propaganda, here it is, just because I have nothing else to put up... that should change soon (hopefully!):

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note* - not creative commons

Halftime from Hell

Wow. It's been over 3 months. Where does the time go? Well, I've been busy, busy, busy with school starting up taking courses within my major and FRENCH 101 (and i can tell you this : Je deteste la classe de francais). It is no surprise then that this entry comes from something I shot between highlights and interviews for my new Grand Valley Television Show "Lakers Spotlight" with fellow producer and Host Justin Hoff. It's the 2008 GVSU Marching Band's haltime show and it's... well just flat out cool. Sorry about the blown out audio and crazy camera movement, this was shot completely on a whim.

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*not creative commons

Exploring the Vine

Mmhmm.. back in Niles again and finally successful in gaining internet access via my own computer. This video is me exploring a large vine that grows on the pergola on my parents back porch. You see my mother is half Italian and has grown a need to replicate Tuscany in our back yard. Step one was the pergola we built 3 mother's days ago and the vine has grown quite nicely and makes for a beautiful back porch. I also know how we all like to refrain from using music as a crutch or illegally and all that mumbo jumbo. But it is, on occasion, fun.

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Clouds

Well, I started off wanting to avoid putting class projects up here but, like many of my previous rules... I am going to break it. Watching this at the Festival of the Arts in Grand Rapids this weekend (with about two other people) helped me clarify my thoughts about this film. On one hand, I hate it. It's cheesy and lame. It tells no real story it has no big message. On the other hand, this film is very important to me. Making it was largely therapeutic for me. I was generally in a bad place in my head going into this project. I only decided to make a film with a "happy vibe" because the rest of my class was making depressing/lonely/desperation/anger films. But it helped me to put a lot of things into perspective and I learned how much better a film can be if it's personal. It is about something, it's about me in only ways that I can understand. Cameron Crowe once said that "it's funny how the personal moments are what affect people" and in the future, that's all I can hope to do and I think this was a fair start. Granted, there's A LOT of things I would have liked to have done differently with this, but hopefully in the future when I need to, I can come back to it. But for now, it simply is...

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Shooting B-roll

Whew.. so... new semester, new apartment, new town, new class... bout time for a new post. Just got back from spending the last week in Alpena, MI shooting a documentary for GV professor John Schmit currently titled "Lake Huron: A Saga of Invasive Species". It's been an educational process with a great student crew. This particular video comes from Rockport Lake as we picked up some B-roll for an interview the first unit was shooting. I have double duty on this project as Gaffer and Second Unit Camera Assistant and I had a moment to take a little video for myself.

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Denouement

The end of my first videobloggingweek. I learned a lot about myself and how I feel about film this week. Even though it doesn't quite come across in the videos themselves. Of course i only partcipated tuesday through saturday, we'll see what happens national blog posting month

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