Wedding videos and videography generally keep me pretty busy here in Olympia. Every once in a while I get to use my video production chops to tackle other projects, like video biographies, corporate business profiles, and one of my favorites – Music Videos.
The band VerleeRose and I recently created a video. The girls are out of Seattle, they came down to Olympia one sunny Saturday and we shot this in about 3 hours. Everyone is really happy with the way it turned out, myself included! I love the video! I would surely like to do more of this kind of stuff, and I’m looking forward to working with VerleeRose again.
There are two versions of the video here, one version with no added FX or filters, and the second “Dreamy” cut as I like to call it is inundated with filters. I really prefer the look of the “Dreamy” edit. Youtube’s services have come a long way recently. I recommend clicking the “HQ” option to watch the video in High Quality. Its worth it.
If I were going to pick my least favorite part of being a videographer in Olympia, it would be that most of the wedding videos and production work I do take me to Seattle. Well, it actually doesn’t bother me that much. It’s only an hour away, and I love what I do. Some people make longer commutes every day, so I really can’t complain. Though I would truly love to get more gigs in Olympia.
Most recently in the wedding videography realm of Kinetic Vision Media is the wedding of Randy and Athena. This is the second Greek Orthodox wedding I’ve shot, the first being for Basil at being MEdia. I’m always really impressed at setting foot in the Orthodox churches, and witnessing the orthodox ceremony, realizing that I’m watching pre-Catholic traditions that have remained unchanged for… oh, well, you know, a couple thousand years. Give or take.
Even more interesting to me was what happened after the ceremony, during the reception. The dancing was crazy and fun! Here I saw dancing to a live greek band that played traditional greek songs. The interesting thing about the dancing, is I got the impression it was even older than the Orthodoxy of their church. Certain elements of the dance seemed almost, dare I say… Dionysian. It was awesome to see the blending of different elements of their culture over thousands of years, all compiled into a days wedding festivity. I enjoyed every minute of it, and I thank Randy and Athena for the opportunity to document their wedding.
Sometimes this video production gig in Olympia keeps me so busy I don’t have time to post here as often as I’d like. Wedding videos represent a major tier of the work I do, and my first wedding of 2009 fell on the first day of spring. March 21st, a noteworthy date of significance to me, as I value dates that mark the changing of the seasons. The first day of spring, the first day of my wedding season, my first wedding of 2009, and the first time I’ve shot at two historic locations in Tacoma.
It was a beautiful wedding at Tacoma’s historic Holy Rosary Church. You know, that really big one you can see from I-5, on the hill overlooking the Tacoma Dome? Yeah, it was awesome. It’s pretty old too. Late 1800’s if I’m not mistaken. Finding intact structures that old in this state always impresses me, especially when they are still in operating condition, and still used on a regular basis. Okay, upon researching I find that the church was established in 1891, the current building was constructed in 1920. Still, it’s impressive, especially for a region lacking in old megalithic structures. Check out the video below and you’ll see the impressive exterior before the video follows Levi inside to the still excellent interior. (though I have to admit I didn’t much care for the blue)
Levi and Stephanie had a great wedding and a fun reception. I learned that when people go to Ohio State they sing the song “Sloopy” punctuated with chanting of O-H-I-O!!! Pretty interesting to say the least. The reception was at the historic Landmark Theater in downtown Tacoma, a fascinating building whose decor was riddled with masonic seals, egyptian flying discs, and other symbols of a masonic bearing.
Levi and Stephanie were very happy with their video, and said they would happily refer my services to anyone needing video production work or wedding documentation.
Congratulations Levi and Stephanie, it was great working with you!
When I first started this video production gig in Olympia, I always knew there was a certain type of wedding video I’d like to offer. A documentary style.
I also knew it would be a hard sell until I had at least one under my belt to show as a sample. Give people an idea of what it was they were going to be getting. I’ve got one completed, and would be all about pushing this particular package on my website kineticvisionmedia.com, except this whole economic situation has turned things around a little. Not as many people are going all out and spending excessive amounts of money all the time. Ah well, I think I will start promoting it anyway. I will posit that my documentary wedding video package is not a frivolous waste of money, it is a fantastic investment. A choice to have documentation of a wedding day in a style and manner that is as unique as the people getting married. Nothing in these videos will be forced or artificial. As with the rest of the wedding videos I do, I try and capture the natural essence of the way the couple acts together.
I could talk about this all day – but part of the reason I’m in video production is because I believe it is more effective to show than to tell. So here is a sample of my wedding video package “The Documentary.”
That 20 minutes of documentary establishes the video you get, immediately followed by the ceremony, reception, and other highlights and good stuff. Visit my website kineticvisionmedia.com for pricing and more information. Thanks!
In February I received an e-mail asking if my video production company in Olympia did “video biographies.” At that point, I hadn’t, but I was very excited by the opportunity to try something new. Wedding videos and web commercials are great, don’t get me wrong, but I’m always wanting to branch out and experience different things, broaden my range, expand my portfolio, and learn. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity. So I was candid, and replied that I had not done any, but would be eager to give it a shot. I recommended another company that I know specializes in such things if the client didn’t want to take a risk with a type of project I had not done before. I offered a fair price and waited.
She got back to me and had decided she’d like me to do the video biography for her mother, who was soon to be turning 80. The video biography would be shown at her birthday party, and copies given out to the guests. Here is about an 8 minute excerpt from the video.
I was very happy with the finished product. Quite pleased. The project in it’s entirety was a pleasure to work on. The shoot was fun, it was nice listening to Iona’s stories, and as usual, by the time I was done editing, I felt I knew Iona really well.
After everything was said and done, I found that Tammy, (Iona’s daughter) and Iona had left a great review on a vendor listing site I utilize.
I hired Ken, at Kinetic Vision Media, to do a video biography of my mom for her 80th birthday. He was extremely patient with her, respectful throughtout the process, and we couldn’t be happier with our end product. I showed the DVD at her birthday party and I had 43 people agree with me that the DVD was amazing. I gave Ken some photos and my mom’s favorite music at our shooting and he implemented them and added so much richness in the creative way he put them and his own ideas all together. He allowed us to do some final editing to make it exactly to our liking and he met our deadline without a problem. I found Ken easy to work with and extremely flexible to our schedule. Prior to hiring Ken, I did much research within a reasonable distance to view the industry standards and try to decide how I wanted this to turn out. Ken offerred his own ideas and assisted us with coming up with a wonderful product and copies that we were able to distribute to our family members as a life-long momento. His pricing is extremely fair and lower than many other places around. Very good value all around. We would recommend Kinetic Vision Media without hesitation and hope many people read this and hire him so they can be as happy as we are with Ken’s work.
Thanks Tammy and Iona!
So I’m hoping to launch a redesigned website soon, and plan on having a section featuring info and pricing on these types of videos, which I hope to be doing more of in the future. Thanks for reading!
These yellowbook shoots! I sure do seem to do a lot of them! For anybody who hasn’t seen these on my blog before; I contract with a production company to shoot these 30-60 second web commercials for yellowbook.com. They’re a lot of fun, I enjoy doing them, they keep me very busy, and they’ve certainly expanded my portfolio! Even though I can’t actually embed the videos on my site, I can post links to the videos, which I recommend watching, as I’m fairly proud of each piece I’ve shot.
I’ve noticed recently that yellowbook has changed their embedded flash video player. The new video player seems to be quite glitchy, which is unfortunate, as the videos don’t look as smooth as they could while watching…
Auburn Muffler Brake and Radiator an automotive shop in Auburn (as the name clearly establishes!). This was shot in October, but only within the past few weeks did it make it up. I have no idea why! I don’t edit these, I just shoot them and send the tapes to LA for post.
D&D Recycling These guys don’t have anything to do with recycling old role-playing books. It’s mostly metal. Not the kind of metal you’d listen to while playing D&D… Interesting, this video was shot the same day as the Seattle Movers video, but this one didn’t post until a month later!
Others are in the pipes! A video shot in December has yet to be posted, I’ll be glad to see it when it does. 6 additional videos have been shot in the last 2 months, and I’m shooting one tomorrow. As much as the economy seems to be flailing, I get the impression the little guys are doing all the heavy lifting! These small businesses all seem to be doing well, and they’re keeping me busy. Thanks for reading!
Every morning my alarm clock goes off, waking me to the sound of Dave Ross’s voice on KIRO news radio. There have been times when I think I should change the station. It seems like every day I wake up to his voice rattling off the number of jobs that were lost that in the days before. I hear him talking about the stock market losses and the overall impression I’m left with is that things are not looking up. It’s depressing. Sometimes I think I should change the radio station.
It’s terrible to know that things are getting as bad as I hear they are. That’s just it though; I hear. Having not experienced any of this downturn personally, I consider myself very fortunate. In October, when it was big news, I remember hearing talk of it everywhere I went, never saw it though. My schedule in October was busier than it had ever been. Yellowbook shoots, the Sweet Adelines concert, and none of it showed any signs of slowing down. I even booked a wedding for November, something unprecedented for me. As bad as I heard things were getting, I still didn’t see it.
Toward the end of November and the beginning of December things slowed down. The Yellowbook shoots fizzled to non-existence. Weddings stopped. There were no gigs forthcoming. I was fine with that because I was prepared for the reality that November through March are my slowest months. Before December was out, I had booked two more weddings. January enters, and 2009 is upon us. I’m taking it slow, starting to crunch my numbers for taxes. I purchased my first print advertisement in The Olympian’s Bridal guide. With one purchase, ’09’s advertising budget had already surpassed ’08’s.
Going in to February, I’m getting e-mails and calls about doing weddings and other gigs. The yellowbook shoots came back; with a vengeance. All in one week! Things are seriously blowing up.
I know that economic downturns are a chance for new and innovative ideas to really make their marks, and I feel like I have some of this within that I want to bring to the table. Trouble is, what I thought was going to be a slow time is turning out to be much busier than anticipated. There are interesting new methods I’ve wanted to implement in my marketing strategy, along with updating my website. Apparently the time I was looking forward to resting on my laurels has come and gone.
Why? Quality? Pricing? I think both. The work I offer is on qualitative par with people charging double what I charge. I didn’t drop my prices for the depression, they’ve been set since spring ‘08. I think my quality will show, and my prices will win major points. Because I’m not doing this out of greed. I’m not trying to pay off a Cadillac Escalade, or a similarly ridiculously large and overpriced house. I’m doing this because it’s really what I want to do.
Back in September I received a phone call inquiring how much I would charge to film a golf tournament, and create a highlight video to go along with it. The caller informed me if was for a friend of hers who had received terrible injuries from a horrible accident. The tournament was to be a benefit, to help he and his family with medical bills and other things while he was out of work.
I told her I would check my availability, crunch some numbers and get back to her with a price. After finding that I had nothing scheduled, I started trying to figure out how much I would charge to shoot, edit, encode, and DVD author this video. Then it dawned on me – I would do it for free.
I called her back and let her know that I would volunteer my time to shoot and edit this video. Each DVD copy would cost $20 dollars, and I sold 4. I certainly didn’t make any money on this thing, but that wasn’t really the point. I think everything came out quite awesome, I like the videos a lot.
Brad Sucks is kind of a default music for many projects I do for a couple of reasons. One – He Rocks. Seriously. Two – Royalty Free. So Brad Sucks make perfect sense to use for stuff like this, he put his music out there for anyone to use freely, and I think that’s pretty rad. I volunteered my time to film this golf tournament, and all in all it was a fun and entertaining day.
That was the intro video, and the next is the Highlight Reel of the day’s events. Be forewarned – it’s 12 minutes long!
A couple more Yellowbook shoots from December have been completed and are now live.
If you’re interested, these are pretty sweet, I like them. There are still a few more in the pipes, a couple I’m actually anticipating quite a bit, a Baptist School in Tacoma, and an automotive shop in Auburn.
Decided to walk down to the old Olympia Brewery and film the Deschutes River a little bit this morning. We’ve had record flooding in local rivers. This is due in part to a lot of rain in the past few days, but mostly because of our record snowfall the last weeks of December, coupled with unseasonably warm temperatures during the rain. It all melts, now I-5 is closed in Chehalis to the South, and Tacoma to the North, really effectively isolating Olympia from the world. Sweet! Olympia is pretty much one of the raddest places anyway.
I shot this in 60 frames per second to get some sweet slow motion action. No, my camera is not HDV, and yes, it can shoot 60fps. Hooray DVX100b!