Posts tagged i make stuff

2011 Reel

So this is a short reel I put together from my professional work over the past year. The only clip I wasn’t paid for was from a Sunday Valley concert, but they asked to use it on their Youtube page and I liked the clip, so I included it as well.

Everything was shot with a Canon T2i and created with Photoshop and After Effects and Edited in Premiere Pro.

Most people put together reels to show potential employers - while I am gainfully and happily employed, I do take on the occasional freelance job (minus weddings. I don’t do weddings) so if you need some work done, feel free to drop me a line at patchdrury at gmail dot com.

Also, there is no Patchworks Films, it’s just something pretentious I put at the beginning. Films…

Death The Halls

Here’s a video we showed at Crossroads’ Christmas Eve services this year.

I am given a lot of leeway, obviously.

I had a lot of help with this one. Besides being a great lead, Caleb Mathis also, stepped in as photographer, grip, and tree puppeteer. My co-worker Jason Koerner did principal photography and another co-worker, Kerry Tuttle was our grip for the outside sequences. A friend, Frank Crabtree, also did some tree-shoving.

The whole process was a lot of fun and I felt like the video got a good response at all four services this year - we even made a little girl cry in the last service. Success!

Gather ye pleasures while ye may

The past two weeks have not been the funnest. This is a small piece of a larger project. Most fun I had today.

Joplin

Last week I went to Joplin with a group from Crossroads to volunteer with recovery efforts and to capture some video. It was heartbreaking, exhausting, and very rewarding. We met some incredible people and hopefully helped a small handful of people regain a tiny bit of control of their surroundings.

Here’s the video that we’ll be playing this weekend at church to encourage people to take part in future trips throughout the summer.

I usually wait until after the weekend to post pieces here on my blog - but this one doesn’t reveal anything content-wise about this weekend’s service, so I feel safe going ahead and posting it.

Plus, it’s not like that many people go to my blog anyway, right? Jerks.

Heaven and Hell

This video was created for Crossroads’ Please Don’t Ask series in which we addressed questions some Christians hope they’re never asked about - like the existence of Heaven and Hell.

This was the second project that intern Cody Guiler helped out with and I’m quickly becoming addicted to having an actual crew - even if it’s just one talented guy.

There are some really bad looking moments in the Heaven sequence because we didn’t think through the whole scene very well. Having a glass table, plate, and wine glass against a green screen bordered on idiotic. I also became convinced that I need a better lighting arrangement and wrinkle free screen before I do any future green screening…

Green screen backdrops

I was contacted by a church in Georgetown, recently, that wanted to start creating weekly announcement videos for their weekend services. They wanted to record them against a green screen and then add in backgrounds and graphics in post. Not knowing exactly how to get started, the church hired me to create some backgrounds and formatting for their announcements. It was a fun challenge. Here, for your edification, are the proofs I sent in for approval. The dude in each of them is just some guy I found on Google standing in front of a green screen, inserted here to show where talent would stand:

I also sent along this cutaway to show exactly what the piece was made up of:

If you need something like this, and can find me, maybe you can hire… me.

21 Hours of Love

In which I try to prove my love to the world in 21 Hours:

21 Hours

This week Crossroads started a new series called 21 Hours. It leads up to Easter. Here’s the bumper video for the series as well as the first video in a three part series:

Everybody Hurts

The band at Crossroads performed R.E.M.’s classic song, “Everybody Hurts” recently and we decided we wanted to make an original video to play behind the band as they performed. I’m really happy with the look of the piece above - it’s not terribly inspired, but it sets the right tone and mood, I feel.

I recorded and edited the piece in HD and then encoded it down to standard def for the weekend since our church projectors aren’t HD. Since I’m still relatively new to all of this, self-trianed, and something of an idiot, it never occurred to me that detail-rich dark footage is possible in HD - but in SD is just a muddy mess. So, thirty minutes before the service I had to go in and jack with the picture levels to get something watchable. It didn’t look too awful in the service, but skin tones we’re a lot redder than I would have wanted.

Lesson learned.

The actual track playing on the video was there for reference while editing - obviously during the service, Crossroads’ band was playing

Big thanks to Kat Vaughan for doing such a great job as my actress and to Jennifer Turner for being a very able assistant.

Recent Project: Imagine A World…

Recently, the director of the Children’s Ministry, here at Crossroads, came to me for help brainstorming a volunteer recruitment video. By the time we finished talking about it, I was begging him to let me film and edit the piece.

I was excited about it because it was a chance to get a little more cinematic than I’ve been so far at Crossroads.

Here’s the video. It features some really talented and really cute staff kids and the extremely talented Matt Hadley, Jason Koerner, and Griff Ray. Below the video is some very self-indulgent process stuff that I recommend skipping unless you’re a masochist.

One of the things I really wanted to try with this piece was directing the viewer’s eye by using a rack focus. That kind of thing is fairly easily done if you’ve got the right equipment - namely a follow focus. While that kind of thing is on my “to buy” list eventually, I came up with an idea to try and accomplish the same effect on the cheap (and when I say, “came up with” I mean “was probably the last guy on the planet to figure this out”).

A follow focus is basically some gears and a knob that allow you to move easily from one pre-determined point of focus to another - on some professional shoots, there’s actually a guy other than the camera guy in charge of operating the follow focus, I’ve read. Below is my shoe-string solution:

Yeah, that’s a rubber band and some tape. Basically, each ink mark on the rubber band represents a pre-determined point of focus. When the mark on the rubber band lined up with the mark on the tape, I knew that particular point was actually in focus. So to move my focus from say, an actor’s face to a set of keys, I simply moved from one ink mark to the next. Simple. Amateurish. Effective.

This was also the first time I’ve attempted any sort of color grading with a video. Specifically, I wanted to give this piece a highly saturated, blue-heavy look kind of like a modern action flick. I was pretty fascinated by the whole process and clearly have a lot to learn. Curious what a little color grading can do for a piece? Well, here’s a nine second video to give you a little idea.

Neat, huh?

Okay, that’s enough rambling. Thanks to Jason for letting me work with him and the kids!