New Year…catching up!!
I’m not the best at adding new videos to my site! Usually it’s because I’m so busy I can’t find the time, but sometimes it’s because of client confidentiality. My New Years resolution is to try and stay more current adding samples of my work.
(I’m currently working on a new passion project that may take up considerable time this spring but more on that soon!)
Here are some videos I made this past year for clients that I wanted to share, in no particular order:
Dino Roar Valley is a new seasonal attraction in the Lake George are featuring animatronic dinosaurs! I had the pleasure of working with some very dear friends on it too so that’s always a bonus!
DinoRoar Valley rough cut 1 from Paul Frederick on Vimeo.
MAGIC FOREST is the sister/brother park connected to Dino Roar Valley! It is a very old and charming place with lots of nostalgia for parents who may have been as kids themselves.
Magic Forest Promo Video FINAL from Paul Frederick on Vimeo.I can’t believe I didn’t post this video on St. Lawrence University’s ADIRONDACK SEMESTER program yet. It was one of my favorite projects this past year! Students spend a whole semester in the Adirondack wilderness. No power (solar panels only) and no cell phones. A complete re connection with nature and outdoor learning at its finest! It’s been a great year working with Tara Freeman and the team of creatives at St. Lawrence. Can’t wait to see what the new year brings!
Also for St Lawrence University were videos for celebrating fall on campus:
And a fun one for their Holiday video!
And last but not least they honored me by asking me to put together a highlight reel of my favorite shots from the year!
In other work…..I also completed a documentary for PBS stations with Producer Vin Tabone called The Hudson River School Pt 2: Cultivating a Tradition. Here is the first 2 minutes of that program. It is available on Amazon Prime and you can also see it on PBS stations around the country!
I’m still doing TV commercials for Curtis Lumber and now some “Day in the Life” spots as well. These highlight what certain positions are like in the company. Here is a sample of what one of their delivery drivers does:
….and a Stager.
That’s along post but I needed to catch up! Have a great New Year everyone!
Documentary style Real Estate videos
I have been making documentaries for almost 30 years now. In this day and age of shorter and faster, it’s nice to still be able to tell a story with some feeling in it. I’ve been lucky to work with Merrill L. Thomas in Lake Placid NY for a few years now. They believe a good story is as important, if not more so, than how many bathrooms and bedrooms a place has. Here a few of my favorites we have done recently in this style.
Student profile Mini-docs!
I’m thrilled to be continuing my work with St Lawrence University! Recently we created some student profile videos. Little mini-documentaries on their experiences and their lives. This is right up my alley as I started with making documentaries at PBS close to 30 years ago. The big challenge now is keeping them short enough for today’s young audiences! Check ’em out…more to come!
Zach Latinville-Inside The Studio
Zach is a friend of mine. He has his own real estate company, The Z Group, but also makes incredible furniture and cutting boards in his garage during his “spare time”. He’s recently been asked by NBC to submit a video for a possible role in an upcoming TV show they are working on. Anyway, I really like doing small “mini-documentaries” on interesting individuals and Zach fit the bill. Shot this on my Sony A7III in about 4 hrs one day while they were getting some group photos done. We then shot over to his very cool garage on a blustery cold winters day to finish up some shots of him making cutting boards for the holidays.
Chazy School: A Look Inside
This is a video I made to highlight Chazy Central School. The origins of the school date way back to 1916 when William H. Miner started it as the first centralized Rural School in the country! At the premiere of my “Heart’s Delight” documentary on William Miner’s life, I was approached by Chazy School administrators to help make a video on what the school is like today. They are a small school but with deep passionate roots and quire a few events and activities that make them very unique! The idea was to put this on their website to give people that are thinking of moving to the area an idea of what the school system is like.
Interviewed on TV for “Heart’s Delight”!
I was fortunate enough to be asked by Thom Hallock to appear on the program “Mountain Lake Journal” and discuss my documentary “Heart’s Delight: The Story of William H. Miner”.
I got my start working at this station in 1990. Its the PBS affiliate in Plattsburgh, NY and started as “WCFE” then became “Mountain Lake PBS”.
We taped for about 35-40 minutes and it was cut down to about 13 minutes. I am clearly better behind the camera but was happy to be able to discuss the program and William Miners life and legacy. The segment below starts with the program trailer, if you have seen that already, you can skip to around the 3 minute mark.
An interesting behind the scenes note, I was just diagnosed with a herniated C6-C7 disc in my neck and was in a lot of back pain. It really hurt to just sit still so that’s why I am moving my arms so much! That, and I am of French-Canadian decent! Enjoy.
William H. Miner documentary preview
I’m happy to present a “coming soon” preview trailer for my next documentary called “Heart’s Delight: The William H. Miner Story”. I’ve been working on this off and on for almost 3 years now! It’s a passion project of mine and I’m finally done with all the interviews and am entering the writing/editing phase. It’s a massive undertaking as William Miner had a very complicated and “rich” life!
More to come for sure but for now, please check out this short clip. Narration by my friend Greg O’Brien.
Jumping the K120 – Lake Placid, NY
What’s it like to fly through the air at 80 miles an hour off a 120m tower on a pair of skis? It’s something I always wanted to know! The ski jumps in Lake Placid have always dominated the landscape since they were built for the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. I’ve been up to the top a few times covering corporate events up there, but was never fortunate enough to see it being used. The smaller 90m is used year around, but the 120m takes a lot of effort to get up and running and just one 45 degree day can melt the ramp surface. With the warming temperatures of the last decade or so of winter, it hasn’t been open…..until this year!
A friend of mine is a ski jumper and mentioned I should come get some shots of it in use. Luckily the technology of video has come so far so fast that there are now some new tools to show this sport in a way that wasnt possible just a couple years ago.
I just received my new DJI Inspire 1 aerial drone and its the perfect flying platform to get super stable shots! Couple that with the incredible GoPro action cameras and we were in business! I hope you enjoy the video, its the closest many of us will ever want to get to going off a massive ski hump like this!
“Songs to Keep” PBS documentary wins EMMY award!
“Songs to Keep” is a Public Television documentary about the life of Marjorie Lansing Porter. She was a collector of Adirondack folk music in the early 1900’s. Marjorie would go around and actually record musicians singing to preserve the songs which were handed down from generation to generation. The program won a regional Emmy, and I had the pleasure to be the videographer on it along with Daniel McCollum. It was produced by Paul Larson at Mountain Lake PBS.
One of the highlights was getting to videotape Kevin Bacon and his brother Michael perform “My Adirondack Home” at their studio in NYC.
I’ve worked with quite a few well known celebrities over the years and these guys were a couple of the nicest! Very generous with their time and cooperative to give us “one more take” for the music video portion of the shoot. The song is super catchy, just click the link below to see this section of the show. (The scenic shots from this section were also mostly mine -except the aerial- including the misty road shot which is actually my driveway)!
Short film “The Country Life”
This is a collection of clips for a documentary I am making on William Miner of Chazy, NY. He was a philanthropist from the turn of the century who made his fortune in the railroad industry. He developed a state of the art farm in the early 1900’s that still is functioning today. It will be a historical documentary on his life that should be completed in late 2015. These clips were shot with the Canon C100 and recorded on a Ninja 2 recorder. Shot mostly with the Tamron 70-200 F2.8 IS lens. I love that lens for getting telephoto shots! It’s tack sharp and very fast and clear at f2.8.
This is a slower paced short, to match the feeling of a lovely country farm in the heat of summer. Pour a glass of cold iced tea and enjoy!
Plants are cool, too! Episode 5
Sorry for the long delay in updating the website. I just get so busy and forget to add new stuff! Here is the next episode of PLANTS ARE COOL, TOO! We shot this the same time as we did Episode 4 in New Mexico. This is a different location and a different subject. We trekked into one of the most remote sections in all of the continental US to search for species of plants that have not been discovered yet! It was also incredibly hot! True desert heat of around 110 degrees + and NO SHADE!! The camera kept on ticking though. Check it out when you get 15 minutes to spare.
Plants are cool, too! Episode 4-New Mexico
Doing this show is one of the highlights of my year! We have such a great time making them and it’s always fun to “get the band back together” to do so. You see, the host Chris Martine and my co-producer Tim Kramer both used to live near me in Upstate New York, but have since moved to different parts of the country. This was the first episode where we all arrived from different parts of the country. It’s always “interesting” flying with TV gear, and this time I had to go it alone. Luckily, it all arrived along with me (not always the case when you have to check some of it). Soon we were on a journey across the deserts of New Mexico to shoot not just one, but TWO episodes of Plants are cool, too!
This episode involves giant hawk moths that fly for miles each night in search of flower nectar — and are thus critically important as pollinators of desert wildflowers. We met up with Krissa Skogen (Chicago Botanic Garden) in New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument and found plant romance happening by the light of the full moon!
Shooting in the desert heat (105-110 F during the day) really was a challenge! The camera got so hot, being black, that it sometimes overheated, giving a temperature warning in the viewfinder! Luckily, a few minutes of down time in the shade gets it back running again. I used the SONY EX1 for this, as doing this kind of run and gun shooting (all handheld) is best with that camera instead of the Canon C100. Its always important to use the right tool for the job!
Oh yeah, did I mention we had to look out for scorpions and rattle snakes all the while we were working as well! That’s a new experience for this country boy from Northern New York!
This episode was the first one that Tim and I did a collaborative edit on and it worked out great! We are both using FCPX and once the file structures are the same on our hard drives, then its just a matter of swapping the project file over the internet to see the edit the other guy was working on! I been so busy lately that Tim did most of the editorial cutting on this one, getting the story down and I did the clean-up/polishing to it. Which included audio sweetening, color correction, graphic creation etc…
Its a long video, so grab a beverage and prepare to get edu-ma-cated!! 🙂
Plants are cool, too! Episode 3
Our latest episode of “Plants are cool, too!” is now online! This one was shot right up here in Upstate New York and features a plant called “Skunk Cabbage”. Our host Chris Martine visits Rachel Schultz to learn all about this amazing plant that can generate it’s own heat and smells like a “Zombie”! Find out how and why by clicking below.
Divine Discontent: Charles Proteus Steinmetz
This a teaser for a public television documentary on Charles Steinmetz. I’m Producing it with Bruce Carlin. Steinmetz was one of the greatest minds of the early twentieth century. He worked for GE and was considered the wizard of electricity! When you throw a light switch on, it’s largely due to him that you get power. He was a hunchback dwarf that barely made it into America. He was the one Einstein and Edison went to when they were stuck on problems, however he has been largely forgotten.
He was also an avid photographer, socialist, philosopher, and his story is quite simply amazing!
We are currently in the pre-production and fundraising stage.
Nature Weeps
I have relatives who live about 20 miles from Newtown, CT. They have three children who are in elementary school, and when I heard there was shooting in CT at a school my heart stopped. While I was glad they were OK I’m still sick to my stomach, as is most of America, at what happened. I started putting this together a few days later. It’s dedicated to all those we lost in Newtown, CT on December 14th, 2012. This video uses a haunting song written by Hans Zimmer called “Aurora” that he created for the victims of the shooting at a movie theater in Colorado this past summer.
When will it all end?
Plants are cool, too! Episode 2: Fossilized Forests!
This episode of Plants are cool, too! brings us all the way out to Idaho in the summer of 2012. We were visiting the Clarkia Fossil Bowl, one of the most unique and rare fossil deposits in the world. In 1972, the land owner was expanding his dirt bike race track when he uncovered some fossils, a fish and some plant/leaf ones. The Professors at the University of Idaho thought the fish was “Ok”, but the leaf ones were what really amazed them. They weren’t compression fossils like you normally see, they were the actual leaves, preserved in the mud, from 15 million years ago!
It was the perfect place for the next episode of our internet show! We worked with Dr. David Tank and his grad students Hannah Marx and Simon Uribe-Convers of the University of Idaho for 4 great days of shooting. While there we met some remarkable people such as Dr. Bill Rember who showed how he can actually “lift” the leaf off the rock and hold it in his hands. I shot it and co-produced along with Tim Kramer and Host Chris Martine. Tim helped rough in the edit and I did the graphics and added all the b-roll footage. It was a real team effort and one I’m real proud of!
An amazing story like this couldn’t be told in 3 minutes so block out 15 minutes sometime and check it out! Its further proof that, well….Plants ARE cool, too!
Hannah’s Hope Fund 2012
Hannah’s Hope Fund is an organization some very dear friends of mine started when they discovered their daughter Hannah had a very rare, neurological disorder. I made a video for them right after they learned of it and this is the follow up four years after. What they have done is nothing short of a miracle. I really wanted to accomplish two things with this video, first, let people know what these ordinary people were able to achieve in just four years and two, help them raise awareness and ultimately…money.
I’ve often times wondered if I could have managed what they have done if put in the same circumstances. We all say we will do anything for our kids, but to actually go out and not only raise 3 million dollars, but sit on the doorsteps of finding a cure in such a short time, is well…mind boggling!
Please take some time to watch this incredible success story!
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!
America’s Team TV Show preview
This is a promo for “America’s Team: Being a US Air Force Thunderbird”. It’s a show about the US Air Demonstration team, and the first ever female pilot to fly with them. The program ran on US Public Television stations nationwide in 2007-2008, and even worldwide. In Japan they made a Blu-ray disc of it for retail sale!
I shot most of it with a Sony FX1, then I edited down over 60 hours of footage to a one hour program! All in cockpit aerials were done by SSgt Josh Gray, the teams videographer.
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