More Cumberland 12 Movie Theater policy videos!
These are always fun to make! This summer we made three new policy videos for our local movie theater. These run before the movie and are a lighthearted way to remind people to not bring in food, be annoying with your cell phone etc.
My friend and colleague Todd Brunner and his family were again used as “the annoying ones”. I also had many friends, neighbors and some theater employees help to fill out the crowd. Everyone was trying to keep from laughing as Todd and his antics are quite hilarious! The manager has said he has seen real results from the “Dick and Mary” spot we created last year, with fewer people talking on their phones during the movies. That’s always great to hear!
More Commercial work
I’m not the best at keeping up on showing examples of my commercial work. It seems like they get made, then it’s off to the next video project, with little thought of using them for my own promotional purposes. For those of you coming here to check out examples of commercials that I’ve done, here are a few. I’ve been doing all the commercials for Curtis Lumber (18+ locations in NY and Vermont) for the past several years. First up is two testimonial spots (actual customer interview and comments, not scripted at all) one for Kitchen Design and one for Deck Design that features a video jib or boom. Then a spot that is scripted about hardwood flooring with their spokesperson. She’s wonderful actress from the Albany region, Rachel Jenack. The fourth is an example of a scripted commercial from actual contractors, each reading a line that connects to the next to form a completed thought.
Next is a fun little spot for Pro-Care Hearing. We wanted to make a hearing aide commercial but didnt want it to be doom and gloom and talk about what people can no longer hear but instead be positive by having people say what they LOVE to hear!
Finally here is a spot I wrote, produced and shot and edited for RotoRooter in Plattsburgh. I worked with Charley Tagliarino of Growtrends in Plattsburgh. He lined up all the talent. You may recognize one guy in this and the ProCare hearing spot!
Schrader & Co. Construction Services TV Campaign
I was contacted to do some TV commercials for Schrader & Co. recently. They had seen my work for the Parade of Homes tour I shoot in the Capital Region and liked my style. They wanted to have a classy looking ad that represented what their company is all about. We discussed it and decided on doing some testimonial spots for them. Getting actual customers to talk about their experiences working with them. I live over two hours away from the locations for these shoots, so we decided to do them all in one marathon day of shooting! While busy, everything went off without a hitch and the interviews resulted in some great comments. It can be tricky to edit down a 10 minute or so interview to just :30! You have to have the company name in there, then tell the “story” of dealing with Schrader & Co. and have it all fit into a 30 second TV commercial.
Here are the three different spots, keeping the logo and theme music the same in each helps make them part of a campaign, instead of just three separate commercials.
Bear’s Den TV Commercial
It’s refreshing when you can work on a commercial that is intended to be “silly”. This commercial was produced by adworkshop. I did the shooting and the editing for it. They had the bear costume shipped in from China! We shot it out of sequence, doing the store shots first when they were less busy in the morning and then the river shot last in case the costume got ruined (which it didnt, but did take a day or two to dry out)! There are several of these, each one has a humorous end tagline after the logo.
“Drawings” TV Commercial
This is a TV commercial I shot and edited for adworkshop. They wrote and produced the spot for North Country Savings Bank. Like all their work, it’s very clever and fresh! It can be a challenge to work with kids but I must say this all went down without a hitch. I shot it with my C100 which I mounted on a jib arm to get it directly over their heads looking down on their drawings. Anne Rast and Kari Hoffman were the Producers and Directors on the commercial and lined up the kids, the location (LP Elementary School) and created the “drawings” in various stages of completion for the kids to color in!
“Sentences” TV spot for adworkshop
I do alot of work for adworkshop in Lake Placid. They are simply a great group of people to work for! Their ideas for client spots and advertisements are always creative and very well planned. This is a commercial for Canton Potsdam Hospital who is their client. Anne Rast and Kari Hoffman did the storyboards, hired actors, and found the locations for each shot in this one. Our goal was to make a “national” quality spot for the client at a fraction of the cost of a big national ad! I’ve been told the client was very happy with the results of everyone’s hard efforts! For those who want to know the technical details, this was shot on the Canon C100 and I used a variety of lights for different scenes. The first shot was an arri incandescent kit, then it was mostly F&V LED Ring lights and reflectors for the outside shots. All footage was recorded to an ATOMOS NINJA 2 external recorder that records in ProRes format (a much higher bit rate then the internal codec of the C100).
Parade of Homes-Real Estate Video
I’ve been working with the Capital Region Builders and Remodelers Association in Albany, NY for a few years now. Mostly producing a TV commercial for them to highlight their PARADE OF HOMES tour each June. Visitors can tour a dozen or so homes over two weekends. This year they wanted me to shoot each home and produce a compilation tour video as well as break out each home/builder for their own separate video. The compilation one is below and I wanted to post it here as a sample of a home/real estate sales video. Nothing shows off a home better then moving video! My very wide angle lens (Tokina 11-16mm F-2.8) was used for the vast majority of this. It just covers more of the spaces in a single shots because it’s so wide! There is some barrel distortion with that wide a lens, but the benefits more then make up for it. Most of this is also shot with my Canon C100. The steadycam shots were done with a a Canon 7D on a Glidecam 200.
An Italian Affair TV Commercial
I do some local commercials for Time Warner cable from time to time. Usually it’s for the smaller establishments that want to get their message out but on a limited budget. This commercial for An Italian Affair in Massena, NY is a prime example of that. The owner Aaron clearly loves everything about his restaurant and wanted to promote it. I came up with the idea of the tired Mom, just getting home from work, and being met by the kids looking for dinner! To keep the costs down, I managed to talk my wife into being in it along with my son and his girlfriend. I also did the voice over for the rest of the commercial!
I utilized my new GoPro Hero 3 camera to get some unique angles. Its a small, 2×2 inch camera that you see snowboarders using strapped to their helmets as they fly down the mountain. Here I attached it to the pizza peel as it removes the pizza from the oven and into a box and also on the order the waitress is bringing to a table. 
The food was all shot on a rotating table my Dad built a few years back for me using a chicken rotisserie motor! Food always looks better when it’s rotating.
We wanted to give off the vibe of a fun place to eat with great food. I think it worked with the help of all the great staff, great food and oh yeah….my understanding family!
TV Commercial-Alice Hyde Medical Center: Walk-In Clinic
This TV ad features the wonderfully talented Aengus Andrew! He was in a spot we did last year called “Boo Boo” and did such a great job that we wanted to use him again. He has no formal acting training but really loves doing it and comes across very natural on camera. I Co-Produced, shot and edited the spot, Tim Kramer Co-Produced and ran audio and Alice Hyde’s Cathlyn Lamitie was also Co-Producer. We shot this all on the Canon 7D with separate audio recorded on a Zoom H4N and synced in post on FCP-X.
TV Commercial-Bluff Point Golf Resort
This a TV spot I made for Bluff Point Golf Resort in Plattsburgh, NY. They are one of the oldest golf courses in the country! It’s very scenic being located right on the waters of Lake Champlain. It was a pleasure to work with the owner Paul Dame and his staff, as well as my niece Emily and her friend CJ who are seen in the cabin section! We are going to putting out an extended video for Youtube soon that explains the cottage rentals and golf course in more detail!
TV spot I shot for adworkshop
Here is another TV spot I shot and edited for adworkshop in Lake Placid. They are the marketing agency for North Country Savings Bank. Its a humorous ad based on the bank’s “We Get the Whole Story” Mortgage/Lending campaign. The spot highlights how NCSB loan originators look at more than just the credit scores when evaluating a loan applicant. I lit it with 3 LCD dimmable lights and 1 of my ARRI 350’s. There was some nice ambient lighting already in the restaurant, and believe it or not, it was during a bright winter day with banks of windows behind the camera and to the left of camera! Using the LCD’s with daylight color temperature as the outside light helped make it all match. I then set the camera for shooting at 5600k and it then it was a matter of augmenting what was there with the 4 lights I used.
As always, adworkshop did a great job of finding the actors and dressing the set to look perfect! And of course they came up with this funny way to show off a service the bank offers.
TV Commercial with some special effects!
This is a commercial I shot and edited for adworkshop. The client was Canton Potsdam Hospital. It was a fun one to work on. I was going to be shooting it and doing the editing. There was some special effects for this one, beyond what we normally do, so I did some test shots in my yard with my son to figure out how to do it. We wanted a jogger to be jogging in slow motion while everyone else was running full speed. At first we thought having him run against a green screen would work, then we could composite him in and then slow down the footage, but then the realities of painting a treadmill chroma key green and how realistic it would look began to sink in! Plus the shot he was to go against would have to moving at his slo mo speed, meaning a dolly or truck shot. To avoid this he needed to be coming directly at the camera.
After some test shots, I figured out that if the camera is stationary, then you can shoot multiple passes and then just mask out certain things (the guy jogging) and it would all look seamless. With the camera locked off on the ground level shot, we had the guy jog towards us, I shot this in overcrank mode (60 FPS instead of the usual 30FPS), so the slo mo would look better/smoother after when played back at 30FPS. Then once he ran by, we positioned the other runners to run on each side of where he was, when it came time to edit, I masked out a box around him and put it over the background runners shot! Since the camera didn’t move, it looked seamless! For the next shot to freeze him, I took a freeze frame, cut out around him (And his shadow!) and put that over the same composition of others running by, again, don’t move the camera and it’ll work! What really sells it is the foreground runners, which I shot over a chromakey on location. Just frame up the chroma key in bright sun, then have some runners run through the shot! The blur is perfect, and all you need to do is composite them on top of the other two layers!
Check it out below!
TV commercial I shot for adworkshop
Here is a spot I shot (DP- Director of Photography) for adworkshop. They are the marketing agency for Canton Potsdam Hospital. Its a great concept that was a fun time to shoot. Kari Hoffman was Producer and Anne Rast was the Director/Art Director. They did a great job of finding all the 1950’s props and also in hiring the 2 kid actors. Anne also made those cool looking baseball cards of regular people to look like 1950’s baseball cards!
My Demo Reel 2012
Check out my Demo Reel for 2012! Its just a collection of some of my work from all areas of what I do. A little bit of everything thrown in with some cool music. If you are thinking of hiring me, this is a good place to start checking out what I do! Then click a category across the top of the page that is more in line of the type of video you are looking for and give me a call to discuss rates. Asking what a video costs is like saying “What does a car cost?” It all depends on the options! Are looking for a KIA, a basic model to get you where you need to go, or do you want a Lamborghini, something very high end that makes people say “Wow!”? Either way, call me and we can discuss it and figure out the best way forward. With over 20 years of doing this, from National TV shows to Weddings, I am confident I can help you get your project started on the right track!
Alice Hyde TV Commercial
This is a new commercial for Alice Hyde Medical Center in Malone, NY. They are one of the clients I have had since day one of starting my own business! In this commercial we wanted to have a generic “feel good” spot about the hospital, not promoting any one branch or service. The little boy is a friend of the family and this was his first TV commercial! The “Mom” was actually my niece Emily. I think they all did a great job.
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