“… for those who have a sense of poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four year old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within…”

Some of the discussion points on the about page caught my attention:
“How does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? … How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? … How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?”

This isn’t the type of work I’d normally feature here, but I’ve been prodded to give it a mention. The above video is an example of the result of the imaging workflow I helped to design for Vancouver 2010’s Olympic Torch Relay. Within a few hours of being shot, the above video was edited & available to broadcasters via satellite, to media (with stills) via the internet, and online via VANOC’s website. I worked with the team at Image Media Farm to craft the overall workflow, including video & photography ingest, data transfer and storage, editing & delivery via satellite and internet across the continent, and metadata retention and archival.

This is the largest Olympic relay yet, and it posed many design challenges. By the end of the relay, there will be 106 continuous days worth of video & photography, all of which had to be tagged and tracked for the more than 11,000 torch bearers and hundreds of cities & towns involved. The equipment had to withstand the harsh conditions of a trek across the Arctic and a travelling convoy back across the country… and all on a budget. Along with several parties needing different edited pieces out of the system and constantly changing requirements, it was a challenge – and one that I enjoyed thoroughly. Hats off to the media team on the road who do the hard daily work of putting this together.

The goal overall was to make my work more accessible and easier to browse. I wanted navigation to be clearer for the first time visitor while still maintaining a sense of discovery and journey as you navigate around the site.

You can still flip through posts one at a time on the blog or see a list of all the recent posts in the index. And of course the most recent news, blog post, video & photography is right there on the home page.

Hope you like it! Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

Peter Chlebak (who did title design for The Duchess) mocked up some frame grabs to include in the credits. They didn’t make it into the final film because of time but you can have a look here.

I’ve got the cutest nieces & nephews this side of Kentucky.

Today is my first full day back from two months away. It’s the kind of day that’s good for looking back & saying thank-you, and for taking stock & looking on. Some thoughts came to mind that I want to remind myself of over the next short season. To keep them front & centre I made this image.

Finding the right way starts with choosing a way.

– John Maeda

Just back from two days with a good friend, enjoying nothing but the quiet of the wind and the rocks under our feet in Joshua Tree National Park. The trip was (purposefully) undocumented, except for a few stops to make these pano’s.

…everything changes when you tell about life… things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start from the beginning: “It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a notary’s clerk in Maromme.” And, in reality, you have started at the end…

The end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story… we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure.

We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in a night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull, rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.

– Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea