You would think that the best part about flying a drone is getting way up in the sky so that you can see the edge of the earth, but over the past year I have been fiddling around with this little gizmo, and I have found the most amount of fun happens within thirty meters of the ground. While it’s great to catch that long distance view down a long wide river, I think what is more interesting is placing your camera just out of reach in a spot you’d never otherwise be able to.
This a compilation of some of the awkward places I’ve put my camera. It’s also a little bit of a study of bridges.
Masterpiece VR is a virtual reality sculpting software. Its company headquarters (Brinx Software), is located in Ottawa Canada; just down the road from my apartment. In 2017 one of my good friends and collaborators Jeremy Plante approached me to produce a mixed reality advertisement for their September launch. The company is now storming the international market joining in partnerships with companies like Microsoft and AMD, Sketch Fab, Intel and many more. As it continues to grow Masterpiece VR is defining new conventions in the wild west of the virtual reality frontier.
Working with the Canadian Museum of History and Canadian War Museum has been a fantastic experience not only because of the interesting content that we get to generate, but also the people I get to encounter. My time working with John Moses on these two pieces may have been short, but I was lucky enough to get a peek into his sensibilities and personality as he described his father’s ordeals. Despite the darkness of the subject matter I couldn’t help but feel a little hope that we as a civilization may one day learn from these horrible mistakes.
It was honor to produce these videos to be played in classrooms all across Canada.
I produced this video while on vacation in Vancouver but that hadn’t always been the plan. Scope creep happens, but despite the challenges that we had on this project, I still enjoyed building a process that would render my editing/screen capping the most efficient. Redoing all of the screen caps in French however, is where I hit the 4am wall a couple of times.
In 2017 I met Martin while waiting for some Chinese food. As a traveler from Belgium he had crossed our country writing songs in each of the cities he had stayed in. At the end of March 2018 he released his first solo album entitled Yarns. This is the music video we produced together to mark the special occasion.
I was about to throw a wedding party when I ran into Martin again. We had each been traveling and he had moved a couple of times since we last saw each other, but I never like to let friendship fade. He wanted to do another video with me, and although I was juggling wedding arrangements and client work, I was keen on the idea. Any opportunity to work with a talent as bright as his, must not be passed on.
White-Out was inspired by a storm on the 416highway between Ottawa and Toronto. Martin had never encountered such blinding snow before he had come to Canada. He had never heard of the term before and when he was relating the story to me he wasn’t even sure if I would know it. But I’ve known white outs all too well, and I had just recently found myself on that very same highway, driving a extra large sprinter Van through a massive storm.
When I handed him the finished video on a USB, he immediately tucked it into his suit jacket. His invitation to our celebration had been as fortuitous as our first meeting.
I often find myself swinging from one job to the next, never having much time to update my site or my reel. “Gotta pay the bills, gotta keep working”, and so on… This is a reel I put together in 2018. It’s a little long but it tries to represent all of the types of work I had done up to that point. The music was produced by my ex-neighbor Rollo Brodie.
When Bridge Brewing was nominated for a business excellence award by the North Vancouver Chamber of Commerce I was enrolled in Capilano University's Motion Picture Arts program. Through a partnership between the school and the Chamber of Commerce I was lucky enough to be assigned the task of telling their story. When we won the award for the best mini doc, I could not have been more proud of my team, but the real people to thank were our subjects. Jason and Leigh Stratton had built a wonderful environment not just for their employees but also for their community. It was no surprise when they won in the category of service excellence.
On a whim in early 2010, two colleagues and I decided to make the 6,990km road trip from Ottawa Ontario to Park City Utah and back. We were known at the Slamdance Film Festival as the crazy Canadians. As students of a small (now defunct) documentary program, we took it upon ourselves to interview as many of the filmmakers as we could get in front of my Sony HDV camera. What we got were approximately nine hours of stories and advice from professionals trying to find their way in an industry plagued by the upheaval of the digital revolution. This short snippet from that adventure was edited by my colleague Jeremy Plante, but was produced, shot and directed by him, Jes Ellacott and myself.