Videos

A travel vlog created around my trip to Japan with my brother. We traveled from Narita to Kyoto, Hiroshima to Osaka, and all over Tokyo. I compiled various different media we captured over this two week period and edited it together into a coherent experience, which certainly was not easy. We had videos and pictures from both of our phones, videos from my brother's 360 camera, videos from my camcorder as well as footage from my mini-DV tape recorder. I used a capture card to transfer the tapes onto my laptop in an editable form after the trip. I also maintained a collection of music I heard on the trip and in my research for the trip and used that in the video for further authenticity. This was also my first big project using Adobe Premiere, and I do not see myself looking back to Sony Vegas. I had my issues with Premiere, but overall it was a really great experience and I think it made the production of this video come along a lot faster, despite the learning curve of adjusting to this new software. I also implemented other software like Blender and Krita more than I usually would, to tie together some special effects that would really only be possible for me in a combination of those software. Overall this video is really special to me and I put in a lot of effort to reflect that. I expect I will come back to this video many times over the years to remember this amazing trip and I similarly expect there will be a sequel in the future when I go back to Japan. Overall the video is really long and while I could have trimmed it down in some places, I wanted to make the video capture our authentic experience as much as possible while throwing in some fun joke edits along the way. 

This is a commissioned piece for Ayera Technologies meant to showcase their hardware and how it connects to the home. This project went through a lot of iterations and I was given a lot of creative freedom on it. Often the workflow was I would be given a general direction, such as "show one of our towers connecting to a home". I would make a basic version of that with what I thought was good composition and lighting, then they would come back with notes. "Make it more blue", "Make the beam more bright and straight", etc. After bouncing it around a few times, we landed on the final product seen below. You can also see the video live on their website here. This project was particularly cool because it was my first real commission and not just a project made for fun or practice, but it also pushed me to use parts of Blender I had avoided before, like the compositor. It also allowed me to push my digital cinematography a bit as I wanted to have some handheld camera feel while also still performing camera moves that might not be possible with a real camera. Overall I think if I had to make it again there are some things I would update, but I overall am proud of the finished product. 

This is a surreal exercise music video made with blender and my full body VR trackers. Using LUXOR, I recorded an impromptu exercise routine to the tune of a song from 1080 Snowboarding for PS1 while wearing my HTC Vive and full body trackers. I then re-recorded on top of that old one as if I was a second person trying to follow along with the routine, and repeated that until I had a group of about 13 goofy characters all dancing along to this song. I then created, rigged and weight painted a character model for those characters, and made edits to each one to make them distinct. I made some trippy materials for those characters as well. I then built the set and skybox and tied everything together. Finally I choreographed the camera movements throughout the scene, making sure to keep them synced to the music. This took a few days to render and re-render once I noticed mistakes, and I am still very proud of it. This taught me a lot about using motion capture software, rendering techniques and optimization in blender, animated materials, and virtual cinematography. In hindsight I do wish I knew how to simplify keyframes at the time, as the mocap data came very dense and that made this project very resource intensive. I also do think that ideally I should have cleaned up the mocap data a lot more, maybe even added some IK to make the character's legs stick to the ground better. Overall though I learned a lot here and I think the finished product is very cool.

This was made as part of a small video jam put on by a twitch streamer named Scorpy, called Vid Vendetta. We were given a day, a handful of assets, and a max time of one minute for the finished product and were basically let loose. In that time I decided to make a 3D video with blender, and just did my best to fit all the assets in. There were a few I had to get a bit creative with, such as a sound effect I could not fit in that I just pasted an image of the waveform in the background instead. Overall it was received very well and was shown on stream. This is just a surreal, creepy, short video that taught me about using blender for videos. You can see the streamer's reaction to watching it here, I feel that seeing the intended audience's reactions to it makes it a bit less obscure. 

Wippy smash is a card game/gameshow hybrid created by my friend Conor and I. We did 3 episodes of this, with over 150 original cards created with original art and concepts. The core idea of the game is that you would play it while playing Super Smash Brothers. You would receive currencies and cards based on your performance in the fight, and those cards would alter the way you played in the next round. The goal of the game is to have the most "Drippy cards" by the end of the allotted time period. These are long videos, at minimum an hour each. These videos were huge time commitments, as we had to build a multitude of systems, physical and virtual, design and balance cards, script out how episodes would go, purchase necessary items for the show, schedule a time where all the contestants could attend, build the set, set up lighting, audio, alternate camera angles, upkeep all of that during the show, edit all the footage together, sync the audio, create on screen displays tracking every player's currency count, create original music for the video, make thumbnails, market the video any way we could, and much more. 

This was mainly made as a mini teaser for Wippy Smash as well as giving me a chance to experiment with more trippy, psychedelic styled editing. This was filmed after we had just printed out the first set of Wippy Smash cards and were testing their durability, we later decided to get them printed more professionally. Overall this is just a simple little music video made in anticipation of Wippy Smash starting. 

This was a drawing podcast with light competitive aspects to it. While the actual podcast side of this could be pretty weak at times, since it's just me and some friends talking, I still think the production taught me a lot. The set, audio, presentation, and editing improved each episode and it served as a solid foundation for techniques I would later use in Wippy Smash, which I am far more proud of. The "game" of Drawin' Bullshit was usually 4 people that would alternate roles. Two as judges, two as artists. The artists would draw something adhering to some prompt while the judges would deliberate over which one they liked more. After a winner was decided, the judges and artists would switch roles and repeat. a winner would be decided from that round, and we would move into the final round where the two winners would face off to be the overall winner. The winner would then be presented with some gag prize and we would wrap the episode up. In general everything here was really loose and informal, and more was just a creative project for me to practice my skills on while hanging out with friends. The formula changed a bit here and there but the general idea stayed the same. I would often print out a packet of random discussion topics for the judges to discuss while waiting for the reveal of the art, since this is where the podcast element was really prevalent. Again, these videos are quite long at an average of around an hour a piece. 

Here we had just two cameras, one on the judges and one on the artists. Each artist had their own computer with an art software and a drawing tablet on it that was screen recording for the duration of the episode. There was also a large green screen behind the judges that allowed the viewer to keep an eye on the progress of the artists throughout the episode. Then the audio was a bit of a variable. Often I would have a microphone on each artist station, then one on the judges table. Sometimes I would have lavalier microphone on everyone though if I wanted better coverage. As usual though, audio is still my weak point on these projects. 

The editing for these was quite complicated as well. I had to sync up the multiple cameras, audio sources, and screen recordings before doing the big, obvious cuts. The downtime, the mistakes, etc. Then I would move onto the content cuts, what does and does not work within the episodes. After that I would move onto pacing cuts, what feels better where, etc. Next would be structuring the green screen stuff. Then I would move onto the more surface level edits, like subtitles and graphics on screen. Overall these videos usually took a while to edit, but nowhere near as long as Wippy Smash. 

For the first few episodes, we would always film some skits to act as commercial breaks to cut to throughout the episode, considering they were so long. Not all of them were great, most were pretty hit and miss but as is the theme here it was mostly just some friends and I messing around. We stopped doing them every episode as they started to feel more like chores than the fun extra bits we originally intended them to be, but there are two in particular that I am still very fond of. 

Dress Nicely was a film made with some friends in high school that still has aspects I am very proud of. This was an hour and a half long movie that we wrote, filmed and edited throughout the second half of my senior year, 2014. We marketed this movie and hyped up the release of it in the school newspaper, and even hosted a premiere. Around 200 people showed up to our makeshift theatre hosted in a barn and we could not have been happier with the reception. This was a very fun production and I learned a lot that I carried into my future projects. 

Overall the production was pretty small scale, I used my dad's camcorder, used the camera's built in microphone for a majority of the audio, borrowed some audio equipment for sections where that didn't work, used cellphones as Lavalier microphones in a few shots, we really just pulled together whatever we could, and I think it shows. The sets were all quite simple, and most were just random places we showed up to and filmed. There were some set pieces that took more effort though. The kill room, for example, was a big, messy undertaking. We also built an air pressure cannon to blast out fake blood to simulate a shooting. We had a lot of fun with the lighting during the drug trip sequences, but in general it was all just natural lighting. The editing was also quite simple for this, especially compared to future projects. Most of the time was spent on basic cuts, pacing edits, reshoots, and timing edits as the few effect scenes were very simple and were mostly in camera. Overall this was just a small project that taught me a lot and that I had a blast making. 

I've been making general gaming videos for a long time, mostly just to clear space on my hard drives, give myself something to work on between bigger projects, and give my friends something to laugh at. Most of them are pretty basic, but there are some that I do think stand out a bit. For the most part it's just funny moments from playing games with friends, with some simple edits like subtitles on on screen displays. I'm just gonna list a few of my favorites here.