I was feeling patriotic this morning, so I figured what better way to spend Memorial Day than to make my first visit the East Tennessee State Veterans Cemetery in Knoxville.
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I didn't have too much time to shoot this video, but as you can see, this site has tens of thousands of gravestones. It's a humbling to see how many people in this area served this country. We're indebted to you all!

​What an incredibly rewarding experience we had this past Friday! 

It was at the Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center gala in Townsend, TN. This was the event for which I produced the above video. The purpose of the night was not only fundraising for the Heritage Center as a whole, but the "main event" part of the live auction was to raise money to help kids take field trips to the Heritage Center.

Before that part of the auction, they played my video.

Then the auctioneer announced the goal was to raise $17,500 for the field trips. What happened next was completely unexpected.

He started asking for $2000 donations. Two people generously raised their auction placards. Then $1000. A few more cards raised. Then $500. Now, the donations are coming in heavier. $250? More and more. By the time they finished accepting $100 donations, they had easily passed their $17,500 goal.

When it was all over, they ended up raising more than $21,000 just from that part of the live auction!

Leigh Wilson, the member of the GSMHC guild who hired me to produce the video, was overcome with tears of joy and rightfully so. She worked tirelessly on making the event special. While she and other guild members were overly thankful about the role the video played in the fundraising, I honestly think it was just a small part of a larger, focused effort.

Thanks so much to Leigh for inviting me and my wife as guests to the gala and for making this video production fun and rewarding! Congrats to the Heritage Center!

On the same day I took the Sunsphere pictures, I also shot some video down by the water fountains at World's Fair Park.

I set my Canon 70D to shoot at 60 frames per second with the intent of slowing it down in Adobe After Effects.

Some of the shots turned out better than others since it was only sunny for a few minutes, but I put few of them together for fun in this video. 

There is a view of the Knoxville skyline I have seen a lot in pictures with the Sunsphere (a.k.a "Wigsphere" to Simpsons fans) on the left that I wanted to find. Turns out, it's from the top of a parking garage on the edge of the University of Tennessee campus by World's Fair Park.

After taking a few pics there on my Canon 70D, I ventured down to the park by the fountains to snap more.

Unfortunately, it was overcast for most of the day so I'll be sure to head back out and try again. Here are a few of the images after playing with them in photoshop.

I noticed the hydrangeas and daisies were blooming nicely in our front yard and decided to snap a few pics and tinker around with them in photoshop. Enjoy!

The House-Hasson video is done!

The good news? The company told me they were thrilled with it, and it matched their vision completely.

The bad? 

Well, have you ever finished a project where all you can see are the flaws? That's often the case for me, and it certainly holds true here.

Now that I've been playing around more with Adobe After Effects, I think I can produce something much better if I sat down and started over. And looking back, I would have preferred to shoot all the video myself instead of relying on some the company had previously shot, but time and budget constraints dictated otherwise, as they often do.

But enough nitpicking. The client was happy and incredibly easy to work with so that's all that really matters!