The sign says “Death Valley”… I’m close.  3 Hours of driving constantly looking at the GPS, and now I’m almost there.  This isn’t going to be easy, I still need to find a dead tree in the middle of the desert.

I was 14 years old when U2 released “The Joshua Tree”.  My dad took me to Sam the Record man in downtown Toronto to buy records.  It was one thing that we did when I had the chance to visit him. Whenever I would go to Toronto, I would think of the record that I would want to buy when I was with him. It was a silly ritual, but it was something I could count on.

Entering the store that day, I knew that the record that I wanted that weekend was “The Joshua Tree”  We bought the 12″ vinyl and the cassette, so I could listen to it on the bus ride from Toronto to London.  Listening to it for the first time, I was blown away on how this had never sounded like anything I’ve heard before.  It wasn’t over produced 80′s pop, it was…. different.   I would listen to the album over and over again and pick out every nuance of each instrument, every drum hit, the crafted melodies that the Edge would play on guitar against the intense vocals.

I could see the rock formations first as I walked closer to the tree.  I was here.

One would never think that sitting at a dead tree in the middle of the desert would have an effect on anybody, but it was outstanding.  I was at the spot where I would stare at the pictures of it, knowing that I had to be an artist.

Overwhelming doesn’t even begin to describe how it felt.  I looked at the tree, and opened the container that held books for people to sign and gifts that people have left behind.  I saw a jar of sand from Russia, copies of the Joshua tree from around the world and a stock pile of letters of love to the band.

I sat down to take it all in.  This was a dream of mine since I was 14 years old, and now I’m here.  Life can be crazy.

I listened to the Joshua Tree in it’s entirety while walking around the site.  The sun was beating down on me but I didn’t care. I would deal with a sunburn.  Listening to the album was surreal and inspiring.  I’m really gonna savour this.  At that moment I so desperately wanted to speak my children, just to hear their voices and tell them I loved them.  Sadly, it was afternoon and they were still in school.  I looked at their pictures on my phone, missing them to death, I wanted to see their faces.

Being alone in the desert is surreal, it’s total isolation.  I was here and all of the other noise in the world was turned down.

As each song rolled by, the experience was one of the most incredible of my life.  I was in a stasis of amazement, inspired beyond belief.

4 years ago when I first picked up a camera, i would have never thought that I would be as privileged as I have been as of late.  Life has been crazy.

I wrote a letter to my children, and placed it under a rock. My emotions poured out onto paper meant for them as they were both all that I could think about.  Hopefully one day they will have a chance to read it….

After over an hour under the blazing sun, i packed everything up and said goodbye.  I took souvenir for myself, I piece of bark from the tree, a rock from the site and some sand.  Whenever i may get discouraged or frustrated by things not going right, I will look at these items and remember how I felt when I was there.

No matter how derailed life can get, it’s amazing to know that every once in a while the universe will reward you.

Music Videos

Stacey Zegers: Sunflower
A simple video with a strong message was the very first Music video that I shot in 2011. The entire process was a three day journey from concept to final product, and was picked up by Kid’s Help Phone. (read blog post here) News coverage here & here.

The Rescue: Televised

Shot at the UnLondon UnLab on a Sunday in March. (read blog post here)

Boss Rebel: Name in Lights
Shot in 2010 but compiled in 2011, this video was the one project that sat on my to-do list the longest. (blog post here)

Stacey Zegers: Rules
Shot at Cowboy’s Ranch in London in March.

Shelly Rastin: High Class Trailer Trash
Shooting this gave me the chance to shoot with Canadian music legend, Randy Bachman.

Burn Like Fabulous: Kettering
My first video that I actually stepped in front of the camera. The song was a project for my short film, Imprint.

Clayton Healey: Find Another Way
Music Video was completed in 2011, Artist is releasing Jan 2012.

Film:

Imprint
My first short film as a writer/director. Winner of the Best Cinematics award for the 2011 London Short Film Showcase (Blog post about the creation of Imprint here)

Frantic
Winner of the London Fringe 2011 62 Hour Film contest.

Promotional Video:

Stacey Zegers: Kid’s Help Phone PSA
Shot for the Kid’s Help Phone celebrity ambassador program

SmithsonMartin Emulator
Promotional video for the SmithsonMartin Emulator DJ product.

Emulator Festival
Video for the SmithsonMartin Emulator festival

Community

Shot on Mobile Film Showcase


2011 marked the creation of the Shot on Mobile Showcase. A film showcase designed where all films entered are shot on mobile devices. I was proud to spearhead this project.

Music

Imprint: Soundtrack
My first journey into music since 2006. The soundtrack was created with friends Mike Scott & Pat Dryburgh. The soundtrack also featured a cover from my new band, Burn Like Fabulous. Download the soundtrack for free here.

Web/Podcast

The Geek Runner.com
A site created with my friends, Bill Deys, Will Spaetzel & Rob Raymond
. Created with reviews for techie runners in mind, with accompanying podcast

My Top Music Picks for 2011: (in no particular order)

The Antlers: Burst Apart
Highlights: Corsicana, Tiptoe, Hounds

M83: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
Highlights: Midnight City, New Map, Splendor, The Bright Flash

The Naked and Famous: Passive Me, Aggressive You
Highlights: Young Blood, No Way, The Sun, Girls Like You.

Cliff Martinez & Various Artists: Drive
A masterpiece from beginning to end, the best soundtrack to come out this year.

Tycho: Dive
Highlights:  Adrift, Coastal Brake, Daydream

Lights: Siberia
Highlights:  Flux and Flow, Banner, Suspension

Porter Robinson: Spitfire
Highlights: Spitfire, The Seconds, Vandalism

Foo Fighters: Wasting Light
Highlights:  Rope, These Days, Dear Rosemary

Coldplay: Mylo Xyloto
Highlights:  Paradise, Major Minus, Princess of China

This past year, I’ve had the idea for the film Imprint rolling around in my head, but never took it farther than a quick treatment. It has always been on my ever growing To-Do list, along with other script ideas that I have. Out of all of the script ideas that I have started, Imprint has always been the one I’ve wanted to take into production first.

In August, I sat down and finally finished the shooting script, and then sat on it for a few days.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Filmmaker Kevin Smith, and for the past year, I’ve been listening to his podcast outlining the journey to complete in latest film, Red State. His journey to create that film has been such an inspiration to me that I wanted to chase my own goals and just get out there to start my own film.

I wrote the movie with my friend Pat Dryburgh in mind for the lead role. The role embodies Pat’s personality on a few different levels, and he was the only one I wanted to play the part. Being that this was Pat’s first time acting in a dramatic role, and my first time directing a scripted feature, it was going to be a challenge.

To flush out the other roles, I cast Andrew Jiggins in the “make it or break it” role where he has to deliver some pretty heavy dialogue and explain the premise of the story to our lead character. Andrew, an experienced actor was exactly who I needed to law down the rules of Imprint to the audience.

We started shooting the night before I left for a trip to Los Angeles, I had one night to shoot with Andrew before he permanently moved to LA. Hearing Pat and Andrew delivering the lines from the script, finally made this idea rolling around in my head for a year real. From there, I was hooked.

During my trip to LA, I attended two screenings of Kevin Smith’s Red State, along with Q&A sessions with Kevin. Hearing him speak about his process to create Red State gave me the charge to finish Imprint when I returned home.

The first scenes shot upon return were with Pat & Stacey Zegers. Stacey and I have worked together 4 times previously, creating music videos, and she fit the role of Gabrielle, a 24 year old with her entire life before her. Imprint is also an acting first for Stacey.

We spend over an hour before shooting speaking about death, sadness, and the most depressing things that we could think of to get us into the headspace the characters needed be be in. Both Pat and Stacey brought their ‘A’ games on a tough night shooting, both emotionally and physically. We also had the police called on us as we were shooting a very loud scene in the park until 4am.

Having the police called on us was a trend that would follow throughout the shoot.

We shot again with Andy Berdan, Sean Quigley, Kevin Van Lierop and Chris McInnis in one long marathon night of shooting. The rush job produced mixed results with some great scenes and some that needed to be re-shot. Working on such a short time timeframe, made me sacrifice certain elements just so we could finish the scene and move to the next location.

This night had to be my favourite night of shooting, although I didn’t get all of the shots that I needed, it was a learning experience. This was also the night where we were filming the car crash scene. During the day I scrambled to find anybody who could do FX makeup and make the actors look like they were involved in a horrific car wreck. No dice. In the end, we ended up doing the makeup ourselves and it looked amazing.

This was also the second night the police were called on us, This time because they thought the actors were actually involved in some fatal accident.

Moving to post production, I asked Pat Dryburgh to also serve as a producer on the film. Working with Pat has been a great collaborate experience, and allowed me to take a step back from the film in my head and see it from a different perspective. From there we worked together editing and crafting the feel of the film, and trimming all of the fat from the shooting script. I can’t thank Pat enough for his dedication to this project.

Being a musician, I always knew that I wanted to score the film myself. Sometimes taking on every role you tend to deliver something very one sided, so I decided to collaborate. Scoring the film, was joint collaboration between Mike Scott of Boss Rebel, Pat and Myself.

Mike and I setup in the UnLondon UnLab to create the basic score of the film, and then Pat & I put the finishing touches on it when we got closer to picture lock. The musical soundscape of the film is something that I am very proud of. It has been many years since I’ve written anything musically so it felt great to dive back in and create.

We talked about releasing the soundtrack for the film, the song features two songs that I wrote the script around. While it wasn’t a problem to secure the rights for these tracks. Releasing them as part of the soundtrack would be costly. The film features the song “Kettering” by The Antlers, a song that deals with the subject of death, from a caregiver’s perspective. It plays an integral role in the scene it is featured in, and I couldn’t imagine releasing the soundtrack without it.

Out of that, we decided to record our own version of the song for release on the soundtrack. Given the fact that Stacey, Pat & myself are all musicians, it was a simple solution.

I flushed out all of the instrumentation of the song, and recorded all of the music. Stacey recorded her vocals at the UnLab, and we went to the studio to record Pat’s drums. Out of that simple project, we decided to film an accompanying music video. The night we shot the music video, while setting up Pat says “We should do this as a band” and from there, Burn Like Fabulous was created.

Approaching the final deadline and 2 nights of reshoots, there was only one thing missing from the final cut. The car that was supposed to be crashed up was in pristine condition on film, the budget didn’t allow for us to buy a crashed up car.

Pat was able to locate through friends a car wrecking yard that would allow us to use a car at no charge.

Seeing the mangled car go up on the forklift and hauled out to be placed on the side of the road was a huge highlight for me in this creative process. It completed my vision for the film.  This also was the third night the police were called on us.

Imprint is set to premiere at the 2011 London Short Film Showcase, where it has been nominated for 4 awards:

Best Story
Best Cinematics
Technical Achievement
Committees Choice

Tickets are available here.

The following night, we are holding a screening of Imprint with a performance by Burn Like Fabulous and Carly Thomas. This screening will be at Fitzrays in London, ON.

Imprint has been a true passion project for me for the past three months. I am very proud of the film. I would like to thank everybody involved in the film. Throughout the journey, I have made some incredible relationships and been struck by such a creative drive, it’s been infectious.

You can visit the Website for Imprint here: http://imprintfilm.com
Download the Soundtrack for free here: http://imprintfilm.bandcamp.com
Watch the Music video for “Kettering” here: http://vimeo.com/30060451
Follow Imprint on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/imprintfilm
Like Imprint on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/imprintfilm

We filmed on a Saturday afternoon in a warehouse with around 50 extras and enough confetti that I’m sure is still stuck in most of our lungs from that day.

Photo by Kevin Van Lierop

In the end we did 16 takes, with take number 13 being the magic number.

Photo by Kevin Van Lierop

Photo by Kevin Van Lierop

Getting the vari-speed vision in my head to work was another beast all together.

To get the frame ramping to work, it was a process of taking the lyrics of the song, matching where each word happened in time on the video as well as where it happens in the song and then telling the editing software to move video frame “A” to match song frame “A”. A lengthy process.

Here is how the video looked, straight off the camera:

There is no lighting and the song is sped up and slowed down during certain parts. This was done so the chorus would always feel slower and the verse by Dreddy would be quicker to match the rapid fire pace of they lyrics.

Once the keyframeing was done, I ran into my first hurdle of the process… rendering. The first render passes that I did on the video would take almost 8 hours to complete. Trying to keep productivity up, it was tough because It would take 8 hours to see if there were any frame issues, and there were plenty. I could only do one fix a day, because every time something need to be fixed, I would have to render the entire thing. Looking back at the process, I did all of the key framing and time mapping in Final Cut Pro… my first mistake.

Final cut pro is an editing package, not a visual effects platform. This is where I made my second mistake… After reading on support boards for the time ramping plugin that Adobe Premiere was the best solution, I re-entered the keyframeing data (1395) events into premiere. While the render time came down to 4 hours, the video would never export properly and produced a jello effect on the band. I thought that my solution would be to put everything on the highest quality and let the mac crunch the numbers. This resulted in a 36 hour render time. In the end I was left with a 20GB video file that looked horrible. This file still had none of the artificial lighting that I had included.

The artificial lighting was done in Adobe After Effects. Out of frustration I thought that I would try the time mapping plugin in After Effects and roll the dice to see if it produced better results. It did. After re entering all of the keyframe data (for the third time now) the vision that I was in my head became a reality. I simplified the artificial lighting because the motion tracking was all over the place. Another mistake, when shooting something with artificial elements, put some sort of marker on the wall so the you can track the camera motion.

In the end, I’m pleased with the results. Approaching a project that requires visual effects, I know that I’ll be more prepared next time.

I’d like to thank the guys from Boss Rebel for their patience with this project.

January started off with a couple of goals and aspirations. First off was my Photo365 Project. Unfortunately, I lasted only the month of January, and then got way too busy to dedicate my time to the project. Below is my favourite photo that I took.

February was the month that I was the busiest. On February 2nd, I filmed the music video for “Sunflower” by Stacey Zegers. The video was received very well and has gained over 10,000 combined views online.

The Anti-Bullying message was so well received that Stacey and I did numerous press interviews discussing the video and it’s message.

LFPress.com Interview

View Video Online

A-Channel Interview

View Video Online

London Free Press – Front Page Article

Ontario Morning interview with Wei Chen – CBC Radio
CBC Radio interview with Stacey Zegers & Edward Platero by redcatfilm

As a result of the video, Kid’s Help Phone invited Stacey to take part in their “Celebrity Ambassador” program. Below is a PSA that I shot for the Kid’s Help Phone website.

In February, I was fortunate to land on the front page of the London Free Press promoting the Shot on Mobile Film Showcase

I ended the month shooting the music video for the track “Televised” by The Rescue

In March, I participated in the Fringe 62-Hour Short film contest. I teamed up with Jason Clarke and Darryl Calcott from Sunny Day Jazz to create the film “Frantic”

Cast and Crew Credits

Director: Darryl Callcott

Written By: Jason Clarke and Darryl Callcott

Cast: Pat Dryburgh, Gerrick Winston, Andrew Jiggins, Kayla Rock, Tammy Chrest and Craig White.

Producer: Jason Clarke

Original Music: Darryl Callcott

Cinematographer: Edward Platero

Editor: Jason Clarke

Colour Grading and Special Effects: Edward Platero

We were fortunate to win this years contest.

2011 has already shaped up to be a great year, can’t wait to see whats ahead.

When FourSquare came out of location Beta and was available to the world, I was excited to participate in the location sharing app. One of the things that appealed to me when It came out was the leaderboard functionality, it became a game to me to start blanketing the city and creating check-ins for businesses and rack up the most points and try and top the leaderboard every week. Fast forward to 15 months later, almost every location in town has a foursquare checkin.

It was also a challenge to me to become the mayor of the places that i frequented, sometimes making sure I checked in before my wife had a chance to so I could steal the mayorship from her.

Then one day, I changed something. Extremely busy that day, my phone would not stop lighting up due to foursquare notifications. I turned off the notification feature and from that point on, I’ve forgotten about foursquare. I still use if on events that are important to me, but not for my everyday life events. I mean really, does anybody care that I am the mayor of Shopper’s Drug Mart? Shoppers doesn’t. I don’t feel the need to check in when I stop into a store to buy milk, nobody cares, why do I have to document this?

Foursquare notifications became like white noise to me, I didn’t care who was where, I always dismissed them when they popped up, but it was a constant reminder to me that I needed to participate in the game as well.

I think that location based apps are great, and can serve a great purpose to a business owner, but in London, Ontario there are very few businesses if any who reward the mayor with any kind of recognition. So what does being the mayor of Henry’s camera get me… nothing. You don’t care, Henry’s doesn’t care, it was for bragging rights i guess, but I don’t really care anymore.

I’m not abandoning foursquare anytime soon, I’m just going to use my checkin’s sparingly and for locations/events that I want to share that I’m attending.

Being that this was his first time having dinner in a restaurant on his birthday, he didn’t know what to expect. After polishing off a Kid’s Crab Legs dinner and half the items from mom’s plate, it was time for dessert.

The staff brought out a warm chocolate chip cookie with ice cream on top, with a single candle lit while 3 servers sang Happy Birthday to Brodie.

Overwhelmed with happiness, Brodie couldn’t contain his emotions and was brought to tears. He was so very appreciative of such a simple gesture of a single dessert accompanied by a song for him. As parents both Tracey and I welled up (she more than me) with pride. It’s nice to see such a simple thing have such a huge impact on somebody.

Brodie saved the candle and the bill (The server wrote him a happy birthday note on the back) and they now reside in the “secret” drawer in his room, where he keeps things that he feels are important.

On the way home, still feeling emotional, Brodie let us know that this was one of the best days of his life.

It’s the simple things….

I love you Brodie.

My Favourite Photos I took in 2010

Also, in 2010, I directed 5 music videos (3 releases, 2 still in post) and a short documentary

I also released my first iPhone app, called RimRoller (www.rimrollerapp.com) and also completed iOS apps for The Walter Greztky Hockey Tournament, and Youth Sciences Canada.

Looking Forward to 2011…

The Social Network

Inception
Can Christopher Nolan do a bad movie?

The Town

Toy Story 3
Gotta hand it to Pixar to create one of the most memorable and moving sequences in a movie this year.

Tron: Legacy
When the original Tron was released, my father took me to see it, and I was blown away watching it.  Fast forward almost 30 years, I took my son, Brodie to see Tron: Legacy.  We both loved it.  My favourite moment was during the light cycle sequence, Brodie leans over and to whisper how cool the movie was.

I still have net seen the one movie that I’m dying to see this year, 127 Hours as it is not playing anywhere in London, Ontario.

Honourable Mentions:
Kick-Ass
Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Black Swan
The Book of ELI

Looking forward to 2011, the movie I’m looking the most forward to is Kevin Smith’s RED STATE.