If you would like to know more about that project please check out “Pick a Card, Any Card“.

They have a series of “personal story” videos that show the positive impact that the United Way have had on the lives of the peoples using their services. We spent the day shooting footage of Cindy Little, both at work and at home, and ended up with a very moving story.

Below are pictures from the shoot and the final video is at the bottom of this post.

Photos courtesy of Doug Little Photography and Erica Glasier.

Chris spent 6 months, with the help of magic inventor and consultant Sean Fields, developing and refining his show. In the meantime I scouted the location, planned the camera positions and booked gear and crew for a multi-camera taping.

I was lucky enough to had recently met 2 great people on the set for a music video shoot that I helped out with, David Clayton (who also took the photos below, thanks David) and Karen Stermscheg. They ended up on cameras 1 and 2 at the back of the room for the wide and tight shots on this production while I was on camera 3 near the stage on rollers so I could get some tracking shots. My camera would also go on stage to get some shots from behind Chris looking out into the crowd.

Along for the ride was Kassandra Swan, a student at Oak Park High School who has an interest in film and video production; she was there to make sure we had the tapes we needed, the batteries we needed and to take care of any issues that the camera operators might have while at their posts. The video course at Oak Park is top notch, they do some great work that Kassandra has been on set for. She was also in charge of tweeting to the MediaCircus.TV Twitter and getting some behind the scenes clips with our Flip Mino.

The night went very smooth; the illusions mystified, the crowd was entertained, the cameras never ran out of tape or batteries; the sign of a successful shoot!

I am currently in post-production for the show, editing the 3 cameras together into one seamless package of magic goodness.

Here are some clips from behind the scenes and from the show itself, enjoy!

Photos courtesy of  KEVIN UDDENBERG

A couple of weeks ago I was at The Park Theatre in Winnipeg interviewing some people for a documentary I am working on. I was up on the second floor in “The Loft” with my camera and subjects. After some time a fellow come upstairs and asked if he could speak with me. A few of my interviewees actually knew him and after some light chit chat he got down to business.

It turns out that he had an event that night in the Theatre and their videographer had fallen ill and couldn’t be there, so seeing that I had my equipment with me, he was wondering if I might be available.

Sure!

It turned out to be a great night, full of art and music and surprises.

Linda Tooley was an artist, and for the last 10 years was the film liaison for the City of Winnipeg Film and Special Events Office, negotiating city services for the making of films, videos, commercials, and major motion pictures.

She passed away about a year ago and the event at the Theatre this night was a tribute to her and her art.

Her husband Reid Dickie, a writer and at one time radio DJ, had for the past year gone through loads of visual material that he and Linda had put together over the years and worked with the people at Video Pool to digitize them from the film and tape sources that they had and have them ready to present for this special night.

Reid started off the night greeting his guests in the lobby and re-connecting with many people that he hadn’t seen in a long time. I captured footage of him hugging, talking, laughing, and got comments from people about some of their memories of Linda.

Then we moved into the Theatre for the presentation and the videos.

Here is one of my favourites.

You can see more at the DickToolCo YouTube Channel.

After viewing several of the videos that Reid and Linda had put together through the years we were treated to a performance by WildFire, an exciting music and dance troupe that put on one of the most unique performances I had ever seen, seriously. The whole performance was in black light with their bodies covered in glow-in-the-dark paint; a little hard to capture on camera in the low light situation but I turned up the gain and let the camera roll.

I put the footage onto DVD for Reid who is now going to edit it into a completed package of memories. Thanks Reid for the chance to work on this great project! Glad that I happened there that night to help make it a success!

Video is soon to come.

Photos courtesy of David Clayton

Dave decided to make a music video that would play on the big screens in the background while the band was playing the same song live in sync along with the live dancers; a visual spectacle. He asked for volunteers to help out, and in additional to several people coming along with their DSLR cameras to capture footage I was there to fill in any spots that I was needed. I helped out with focus pulling, moving gear and even got to shoot some of the video with Dave’s DSLR camera rig.

Last night was the big show and video debut and it was a great success!

Here is a little behind-the-scenes video I made about the day of shooting.

Here I am trying my hand at shooting with Dave’s DSLR rig, a great camera, easy to shoot with.

The completed video! Click to load it in a new window.

Chris has a show coming up called “Dreams and Wonders”, which is taking place on October 30th at the Pantages Playhouse in Winnipeg. The proceeds for the show are going to the Children’s Rehabilitation Foundation and we are going to be doing a live multi-camera taping of the show, it is going to be a great night!

In preparation for it we’ve been creating some video and graphic animations to make elements that can be used in the promotion of the show around the interwebs.

This video was shot in HDV and captured in Avid Media Composer and then exported to After Effects. In After Effects we used masking, keying with Keylight and particle generation with Trapcode Particular to come up with the final product.

Check out this video to see the progression of the animation that we created, from the original shoot to final product. And please check out Chris’s show, it will be a night of wonders!

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/mediacircustv.rss

That’s it! Just add whatever text you want in just before the .rss and the videos with that tag will be pulled up, so tag your videos with your username and you have an RSS feed. Of course if someone else tags their video with your username it will show up in the feed.

Not a bad idea if people are saying nice things about you.

For example the first item in the list right now is a video I shot for entertainer Scott Burton, because he put my companies website URL in the video description. So this RSS not only will grab the tags it will also look at URL’s in the post. Good to know!