Steal These Videos: Summer Edition
- July 1st, 2010
On my brick of an external hard drive, I have about 300 GB of raw video collected between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River that is waiting to be edited into some entertaining/informative format. Before I started that culling process, I needed a little pick-me-up, a dose of uncut HD smack to get me going.
As always, it wasn’t hard to find. These videos, some old, some new, all summer, are the stuff of aspiration, inspiration and, since its at least 105 F here in Iraq every day, perspiration.
California is a place. – Borderland
Drea Cooper is a filmmaker with a flare for making awesome videos that make you want to buy stuff. Zackary Canepari is a silly good photographer who has done a lot of work on the subcontinent. Together, they released a series of videos a few months ago under the “California is a place.” moniker. Every stunning video lays out a California story, but Borderland stands out for its amazing characters and coherent color grading, a darkness accented by strong greens and blues that really snap. If you like it, check out Scrapertown. Awesome in a totally different way.
The New York Times – A Year At War
A while back, New York Times photographer Chang W. Lee did a video series in NYC called Second Chance. It was the NYT first foray into dSLR features. (Lee has also worked in the Kurdish region of Iraq, where I am right now.) His series experimented with video forms and showed me a lot about how to do news video for the Web. But it was also done close to home, for The Times, and didn’t hew to their hard-news strengths. Now, my favorite NYT photographer, Damon Winter, has taken his Canon to Afghanistan for their year-long series on the deployment of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division. The result is a moving and well-paced seven-minute feature video that combines stills and videos effortlessly. The interactive portion of the project features “moments,” essentially moving photographs similar to my Tableaux Vivants. Can’t wait to see where this one goes.
Artem Sergeevich - SERFOMAY 2010
This video is the first Russian-speaking entrant into my Steal These Videos series, and I’m pumped to feature the work of someone from my adopted second homeland. Artem is from Minsk, not Moscow. (I won’t hold it against him.) And the video is filmed on the shores of the Sea of Azov in Ukraine. It’s just fun. И русский!
Travis Fox – The Economy of a Tent City
Travis made an appearance in my last STV post with his first feature from Haiti done in collaboration with Adam Davidson of NPR’s Planet Money but for PBS Frontline. This is the second feature from that series, notable for its nice work in low-light shooting and the continued use of radio-style narrative. Travis is one of my favorites, so whenever he does something, it will probably make this list.
Romain Basset – Faces and Landscapes
This video makes the list for its amazing portraits and post-production awesomeness. Many of the edits are rapid and counter-intuitive, lending an ethereal quality to the whole video. I’m not sure how he does the amazing overlays of blur on beautifully composed shots, but I want to find out. The color correction is a little more varied throughout the video, giving each shot its own feel.
Selected Timelapses
I’m starting to play more often in the world of timelapse photography, and I’ve begun to find out just how difficult it is to make great timelapses. There is a whole host of challenges that I’ll discuss in a later post. But to find out how to do it well, I browsed a bit on Vimeo and found some amazing examples.
zoomion – Sahara Wonderland
Alex Silver – You’ve Got to Love London
