Video Project in 3 days = No sleep

James and I on our first day of shooting...prior to sleep deprivation...

So those of you who don't know...I have had all of 8 hours of sleep over the past week. I got approached by a GM in my district about creating a video project around customer acquisition and innovation in our local stores last week. I agreed to work on it without knowing when he needed it by (he made it sound like their was plenty of time). The next day he calls to tell me a little more about the project. This is a video which is to be made to show to our Executive Vice President of Retail and our CFO who would be coming to our territory office on the 27th. I said "The 27th of July? Okay." No...it was the 27th of June. This conversation was last Friday the 20th.

I freak out as I had to work all weekend and was scheduled to work all this week. I managed to get my employees to work a bunch of extra shifts to cover me, and grabbed James ( a friend at the company who I've done several video projects before...also a fellow contributer to Tech Tuesdays at Sillyman.org) and filled him in on the details. We began shooting Monday morning and found out Tuesday afternoon after shooting the last bit that this video needed to have a rough draft (90% complete) by 3PM Wednesday...

To make a long story short, this project took about 50 hours of actual work and James and I were sitting in front of a camera or a computer for close to 65 hours (waiting for things to render, import, ect) over the course of 3.5 days. We found out Thursday EVENING that the time for the presentation has been cut back, and due to time constraints they won't have time to show the video (it's only 7.5 minutes long!)

I wasn't going to blog this, but I emailed the video to a couple friends in the industry and they wanted me to post this up just to show everyone exactly how (to put in Armin's words) "...this really shows how much TIME and EFFORT goes into a freakin’ 7 minute video!"

Sorry I am not willing to link or post this video as it is does contain proprietary company information, but just rest assured that it came out great.

At least I got out of a blue shirt for a few days...

Softball 08

Today I was shooting a softball game for Best Buy's D91 annual tournament. They usually don't take it seriously as to go out and make uniforms specifically for the event, but this year the Gainesville store went all out and got jerseys made. Sterling VA completely dominated every round they played, with the first game being the biggest landslide with Sterling aat 28 runs OVER what Gainesville had. I took about 1700 shots and boiled it down to the top 250ish and uploaded the lot onto noahhayes.net under events if you'd like to view the events from the whole day, but I decided to post a couple of my personal favorites here for you. 

You usually don't see baseball/softball games from the angle of the field in photos, but here's one...

Stu = failure   Kyle = hero

Kyle's pretty fast too

Stu warming up

Zach's would-be hilarious shirt if 1022 (Leesburg VA) had more than three people show up to play...those three got stuck on Rick's team

George sporting his Julbo shades...

These were some pro-quality burgers and dogs, many thanks to Helen for feeding everyone...

Jermaine decided to play a little basketball while on a break between going up to bat...

Leanna and Kat(below) both decided to slide head first into the muddy expanse between 2nd and 3rd base...

Hope you enjoyed these, I've got some new photo toys I'll be testing out this week and putting a full review (or at least some sample photos) later this week when I get some more time. (BTW I usually don't shoot JPEG, but I did today expecting to take more photos than normal...I used up nearly 11 GB of cards using JPEG alone, which was mind boggling to me. Fortunately nearly all the shots were great straight out of the camera and the only post-processing I had to do was a little cropping here and there)

All in the Cards

Well I just my new business cards in an hour ago, and they look and feel great! I got them through a company called Plastic Printers (original name...) and they were very friendly and easy to deal with. I do suggest if you order from them to not waste your time or your money having them design a card for you though. I had them send me about 3-4 proofs before giving up on their design team and just designing my own. I had made about 3 different designs and emailed copies to a couple friends and this design is the unianimous decision among them. Hope you like them! I know I do (I hope potential clients do too!).

A couple of my new cards in the Boda Card holder (courtesy of Jim Garner and Boda Bags)

A card resting against my 14-24 f/2.8 lens to show you the translucency

Used a lens as a card holder...yes that's my site in the background

Facebook

Yes that's right ladies and gentleman...I have a MyFace now. I've really haven't checked my Myspace page in over 2 years except when people try to add me and I get an email, but I've had quite a few people ask me "Do you have a Facebook?" recently and I guess I finally caved into the pressure and got a Facebook...I haven't uploaded anything to it yet, and I guess I really don't understand why everyone gets addicted to those social networking sites, but maybe I'll get addicted too. I'll probably get a couple photos up there later this week and tweak it to make it as crowded and overwhelmingly busy as possible and never remember to check it again...but so is the world of SNS (social networking sites) I guess.

More Nostalgia

As I was posting my "Where's Waldo" post, I was listening to some of Joe Satriani's "Strange Beautiful Music" Album, and I was thinking "This music would make a perfect soundtrack if they ever made a Mega Man movie!" Then it hit me, you all have been there before. Nostalgia. You smell a familiar scent, hear a riff from a song you loved, but haven't heard in years, or see a familiar feature in the face of a stranger and it hit you like a ton of bricks. It hit me in an unusual way...I become temporarily obsessed with tracking down my old NES from the boxes in my basement and playing some 8-bit goodness. I found my NES, but alas I was missing the power supply, so I opened every box I could find. When I finally tracked down the original power supply and plug it in...nothing. The supply was dead.

There was only one thing to do, I scavenged the house looking for a 9V 1.3a power supply with the proper sized plug...it took about an hour, but I found a generic supply that worked great! I popped in Mega Man 3 and I was up until 1AM last night trying to beat Snakeman and Hardman while grooving to that awesome music I remembered! I'm finding the game SOOO much harder than I remembered it.

That's one happy guy there!

I dare not try to plug the NES into my Samsung 1080p LCD for fear it would spoil that nostalgic feeling...

Edit: for those of you out there who were either too old or too young to understand what I'm all excited about... the NES is Nintendo's (the company that makes the Wii) Nintendo Entertainment System, it was originally released in 1985, and the game I'm all psyched about is Mega Man 3 which was released in 1990.

Where's Waldo?

A few years ago I found this on someone's website and downloaded it onto my computer. The picture is of me back in high school. I have NO idea how the person found the picture to even put online, as they lived in California and I don't think they went to my school, but I was just cleaning out one of my hard drives and came across it again, and thought some of you out there might enjoy a picture of me from back in the day.

This picture was a crop from my senior yearbook panoramic. They had everyone go into the gym and sit on the bleachers for a HUGE group shot. I decided to dress up for the occasion, but I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt over top of my outfit as to not cause suspicion (or suspension LOL). The glasses by the way were made out of black pipecleaners. The funny thing is I discovered after the photos had been taken that the Yearbook Committee had joked about putting a cartoon insert of Waldo into the photo using Photoshop 7.0 (yeah it was that long ago, LOL).

...and no I do NOT still have this costume!