Photo by Neilson Eney
One of the strange things about making videos for the Storm, is that we rarely get any feedback from the fans. It's not as bad with the Storm as it was with the Sonics, but it's always hard to tell how much of the crowd actually pays attention to the time-out videos, plus I'm working in the video booth for the whole game, so I can't even see the crowd react. But it turns out at least some of the fans pay attention to the videos, and they talk about them on StormFans.org.
The opening video was touching, but not crowd pumping. I think it was just some sort of cinematic orchestral piece. The graphics looked really good on it though. It starts on the light on the top of the Space Needle (possibly from the logo), the red bleeds out and flys into the KeyArena logo. then it goes inside the Key to the court with some pillars and a huge torch like thing. Around the torch are revolving screens that show memorable moments in Storm history. The announcement by Ginger Ackerley, the drafting of Sue and Lauren, the championship, the purchase by Force 10 and then a bit about last season and the incredible home record. Then a 2009 drops down, pulses and explodes. Behind the explosion is our starting 5 (or there abouts since I think the starting 5 will be changing up from time to time). So that was the opening video and you can see why most people do storyboards. I'm sure my explanation doesn't make a ton of sense. I'll be curious to see if that's always the opening video. It looked expensive to produce so I would guess yes. But it also wasn't a clap-along type of piece.
That is a freakishly accurate description of our intro video... they remember all that after one viewing? (the graphics in the intro video are by Lars Simkins AKA, AAD Productions)
Jumbotron opening made me tear up. That's our history people and I'm proud of it.
At least we got one of them!
I am not sure if that is the season long piece...we shall see. I took good notes, but it is late so I will write tomorrow.
They take notes!!!
They aired Part 1 of a 6 part video series on the history of the Storm. It was an interview with Karen Bryant about the founding of the franchise and covered a lot of Lin Dunn doing what Lin did best. Loud applause for both Lin and Kamilla as the first player on the franchise.
Some of these videos will be online soon, I'll update once they are. And thanks for the feedback stormfans.org, keep it coming! let me know what you like, don't like, and want to see more of.
Doppler waiting for Sue Bird at Sea-Tac
Couple of my videos up online this week. The first is a Doppler Skit I shot a couple of weeks ago, where Doppler goes and greets Sue Bird at Sea-tac. It's not the greatest thing I've ever shot (some seriously bad audio throughout the whole thing), but it got some pretty good laughs when it played in-arena at the Storms pre-season game. Some of the footage I shot that night also aired on King 5 the next evening.
Spike Lee at the Egyptian
The other is a CHS article/video of Spike Lee. Spike Lee was being honored with the Golden Space Needle Award at SIFF, so I went and shot some video. The event was pretty dissapointing overall, terrible questions from the moderator and audience lead to a pretty boring couple hours... as you can read about in the comments.
Funny video for anyone who's ever edited with a client. I love #10. I'm sure any editor could put together a list like this, and I bet they would all look pretty similar to this one.
A coupe of random notes...
1) I changed my email address to dalbrightvideo@gmail.com, and my twitter name to dalbrightvideo
2) About a month ago I started getting a ton of spam comments, so I've been in the habit of deleting mass amounts of comments at once. The way I thought I was telling the fake comments from real ones was by looking at the website entry and if it said http://website, then I figured it was spam since that's obviously not a real website. Now I realize that if you leave the website field blank, which most commenters probably would, it puts http://website. So sorry if you left a legit comment and it never showed up. But who am I kidding... nobody comments on my blog anyways, they were probably all spam!
3) I added some more twitter feeds to the right column over there. One is the @CHSfeed, which just puts out a twitter message everytime a new story gets put up on the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, sometimes it will be one of my posts on CHS but not always. The other is the @seattlestorm, which is of course, the Seattle Storm.
Sue Bird waiting her turn in our green screen room at Storm Media Day 2009
Storm Media Day has come and gone. I think it went pretty well overall, but it's always hard to tell. Media Day is 3 hours of chaos, where the media outlets come to the Furtado Center, set up a station, and then all the Storm players rotate through the stations. Even though we work FOR the Storm, we still only get the players during media day, just like any other media that decides to show up. I think this pic of Sue Bird is a pretty good indication of how all the players generally feel about doing media day (photo by Aaron Last - click here to see the rest of the gallery on the Storms site)
The first pre-season game was on Thursday, and from my POV it went surprisingly smoothly for a first game of the year. We had couple of videos that played, but nothing too exciting... we're saving the good stuff for Opening Night (June 7).
Seattle True Indepedent Film Festival 2009
Hope Art will be screening at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival on Friday June 5, at 6:15 along with 5 other short films, at the Jewel Box Theater in Belltown. Hope Art is the only Non-Fiction piece in the showing and I can't decide if that's a good thing or not. On the one hand it'll stand out since it's the only doc, but that also means it'll be showing to a room full of people who many not be that in to docs. But I'm still really excited about it, it'll be my first public showing in Seattle.
The Hope Art page on the STIFF site allows reviews... so if you've seen Hope Art, go write me up good a review!
By the time Barack Obama was sworn in as president, the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle was covered in Obama Art. 'Hope Art,' takes a look at this phenomenon from the perspective of the artists, but also digs deeper to ask what this proliferation of Obama art means about the neighborhood. Are they merely displaying their support for their candidate, or are they being too quick to memorialize a president who hasn't even had the chance to prove himself?
DIRECTED BY David Albright, MUSIC BY Colin Short, PRODUCED IN ASSOCATION WITH the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog FEATURING Jen Graves – Art Writer for the Stranger, Spike Mafford – Photographer, Shelly Farnham – Artist, Damion Hayes – Currator, BLVD Gallery, Kate Stineback – Capitol Hill Housing
The point of this blog was supposed to be to update you all on work related stuff, but it turns out there's a problem with that... when I have no work, I have lots of time to update this blog and I end up with posts like this. Then when I do have work, I don't have any time to be updating my blog.
Anyways, for the past two weeks I've been busy editing a Sealaska video for Morgan Howard Productions. I spent pretty much all day every day for the past two weeks editing away at that video in Kirkland, so needless to say I'm glad it's done. We shipped the DVD off to get duplicated (16,000 copies!) on Friday, and then it'll be mailed out to all Sealaska shareholders next week-ish.
Dance Troupe Auditions
I also shot the 3 day process of Storm Dance Troupe auditions which was a lot of fun. It's a pretty intense process for a kids dance group! Shellie Hart of Kube 93 was there as a celebrity judge, and has the full run down on her blog along with some videos. (no direct links to the individual posts... but the troupe posts are dated 4/15, 4/17, and 4/20).
The NW Projections Film Festival was last weekend in Bellingham. My doc short, Hope Art played and so did Kung Fu Joe. I wasn't able to make it because I was worked straight through the weekend but I hear the Hope Art showing went well and played to a packed house. The next showing of Hope Art will be at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival in a month or so... more details to come on that one.
HOPE ART from NW Projections Film Festival from ENW with Deb Slater on Vimeo.
And last but not least I also got a big video contract to do video production for a local sports team... apparrently I'm not supposed to talk about it publicly yet, so that's all I'm saying for now.
I went up to Bellingham yesterday to shoot a time lapse video for artist Ben Mann. If you live in Bellingham, you've seen Ben's work, it's EVERYWHERE. Mambo Italiano, Little Cheerful, Mallards... This is the first time I've done a time lapse this long and I think it turned out pretty good. I plugged the camera into the computer and just captured directly to the hard drive instead of recording to tape. So I didn't have to worry about switching tapes every hour and didn't have to put all that wear on the heads. The painting took about 4 hours.
Ben Mann - Performance Art (Time Lapse) from ben mann on Vimeo.
One of the first videos that I made as a "professional" (i'm using the term very loosely here) was for Ben back in 2005-ish, while I was a student at Western. You can see it after the jump. I shot in on my parents' 8mm camcorder, with no external mic, no lights and no idea what I was doing. It's a miracle that it turned out as well as it did.
Starting today you can buy ads on CHS-V through CHS's ad service. New CHS-V videos are consistently some of the most viewed stories on CHS, both because of the CHS traffic, but also because they're often linked to and embeded by other sites like Seattle PI, The Stranger, and many others. This means if you advertise on CHS-V, your ad will reach far beyond just CHS. So what are you waiting for Seattle businesses?!
Advertise on CHS!
Side note - I don't love the idea of having advertising on screen at the same time as my video. But this is the best way we could think of to a) give the advertiser good placement, and b) not make the viewer have to sit through an ad to get to the video. Obviously I would prefer to have post-roll ads, but who honestly sits through those... if the video is over, you can just go on to something else. Pre-roll ads are just annoying and I would never use them*, so I thought this was a good compromise. Plus as long as it's local businesses ads it's not so obnoxious as a Clorox ad or something. Since I shoot widescreen, I just have to move the image down in the frame to make room for the ad, rather than actually placing the ad over part of the image.
*This is not legally binding, so don't hold me to it.
Photo by Neilson Eney
One of the strange things about making videos for the Storm, is that we rarely get any feedback from the fans. It's not as bad with the Storm as it was with the Sonics, but it's always hard to tell how much of the crowd actually pays attention to the time-out videos, plus I'm working in the video booth for the whole game, so I can't even see the crowd react. But it turns out at least some of the fans pay attention to the videos, and they talk about them on StormFans.org.
