I'm thrilled to start 2017 shooting more videos for Bike Elf!
This week, Bike Elf announced its partnership with the Wesley House Community Center, which "currently provides academic, emotional and spiritual support to 100+ at-rish inner-city students" according to its website. The two sides struck a deal. Any kid (or counselor!) who gets all A's and E's on both of their next two report cards will get a free refurbished bike, helmet and lock from Bike Elf! This is my favorite part about Bike Elf. Kids aren't just handed bikes for free. They have to earn them. The video above is from the day Bike Elf told the kids the deal. I was able to shoot it and edit video all in one day (just like in my old TV news days). Enjoy!
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I'm happy to continue making videos for Bike Elf. This past weekend, about 40 volunteers assembled 30 new bikes to donate to the Salvation Army, cleaned and refurbished 20 used bikes, and took in 17 donated bikes all in one day!
Deserving kids throughout East Tennessee will earn these bikes in the near the future. Amazing work for a charity that is only it its second year! This video is a short look at all that hard work this past Saturday. It was fun utilizing the angles with my GoPro Hero 4 Session, and honestly, I should have used it a lot more. I noticed during the holiday weekend the video I produced for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation of East Tennessee reached 10,000 views on YouTube.
Since starting my own freelance business, this the video project where I learned the most and found the most rewarding. Cystic fibrosis is the most common inherited disease among white newborns in the United States, with a 1 in 2,500-3,500 occurrence rate. There is still no cure for CF and children suffering from it often have to take 20-30 pills a day. While the life expectancy for those with CF has increased in the last few decades, the median survival age today is only 40. If you haven't seen it before, please check it out. And you can donate to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation of East Tennessee here. I shot this video last Memorial Day, but I wanted to share it again as a small way to thanks to all the veterans who helped give us the freedom we enjoy in our country.
If you're every in the Knoxville area, a stroll around the East Tennessee State Veterans Cemetery can be both inspiring and humbling. As promised in my previous blog post, here is the completed highlight video from the wondering wedding of Kayla and J.D. Botner.
I experimented a little more with the effects on this edit, but hopefully it doesn't distract from the moments captured from the day. Thanks again to the Botners, Chapmans, Byrnes and Whaleys for hiring me to capture their special days this fall. I can't wait to shoot the next one! So many words could describe my first fall shooting wedding videos: fun, rewarding, challenging. Above all, the most accurate word is "grateful."
Thank you so much to the four couples who trusted me to shoot one of the most important events in their lives. So far, everyone has been exceedingly easy to deal with and equally as appreciative of what I provided them. Unless something unforeseen happens, my fall wedding season wrapped up this weekend with the nuptials of Kayla & J.D. Botner, who held their festivities at the picturesque Fillauer Lake House in Cleveland, TN. Their story is slightly untraditional in that they were legally married back in December before J.D. spent a lengthy stint away from home serving in the Air Force. He returned to Tennessee recently, and this past Sunday was one of the few days they could schedule a ceremony in town before they quickly move to Arizona. The life of a military family. My shoot went rather smoothly thanks to my wife Martha, who was able to help out again and work as a second videographer. She mainly stayed on the tripod. Circumstances left me without my monopod (or slider) so I used my Revo shoulder mount most of the night. Decent results. It's much easier to move side to side with the shoulder mount, but it tends to make the shotgun mic bounce around more, and the monopod certainly is easier on my back. As for cameras, in the past, I've rented a Canon 5D as a second camera for weddings to go with my Canon 70D. This time, I rented a Nikon D500 instead. Like my Canon 70D, the Nikon D500 is crop sensor. But for a crop, it's incredible in low light! I was shooting with ISO above 5000 at times, whereas on the 70D, I would start seeing noticeable noise at 1600. It's a few hundred dollars more expensive than a 70D, but if you have it to spend and have no extreme loyalty to Canon, I recommend the D500. But enough camera geek talk. Enjoy this preview highlight video (a trailer, if you will) from the Botner wedding. I'll release a longer version some time next week. You want an easy gig? I got one.
This past Saturday, while the leaves in the mountain trees were changing into full kaleidoscope color, I made the gorgeous 90-minute drive to Pineville, KY (in the Cumberland Gap area). That's where the Bell County Animal Shelter is located. Recently, the shelter received a grant from the American Veterinary Medical Foundation to renovate their facilities. AVMF hired me to shoot video of the renovation. I could post video of people painting, drilling and hanging up doors. But that's not what you want to see. So by popular demand, this video contains nothing but the adorable puppies and kittens at the Bell County Animal Shelter! Take one home today! This was a first. Well, kind of. I shot this wedding by myself. No second camera person. For my first couple wedding shoots, my wife Martha was able to tag along and operate the camera at the back of the ceremony, but she was out of town during the Monica and Shawn Chapman wedding at the beautiful Legacy Springs Premier Events Center in Madisonville, TN. No big deal though. Thanks to a little pre-planning and more than ten years of experience shooting news/sports stories solo, this went wedding went off without a hitch. Take a look at the highlight video above and see for yourself. The bride had a few special song requests for the video, and I think they complimented it quite nicely. For the ceremony, I locked a Canon 5D on a tripod in the back of the crowd, mounted a GoPro Hero 4 Session behind the couple and the preacher and carried my Canon 70D on a monopod to switch up the shots. I haven't posted any "raw" wedding videos yet, but I offer them to the couples as part of the package I provide them and here's how this one turned out. For the reception, I switched things up a little bit. Normally, I carry around my 70D and lock the 5D on the tripod because the 70D is so much easier for me to use as a run-and-gun focus-on-the-fly camera. But the 5D is stronger in low-light settings and is a better camera overall (when used properly) so I shot most of the reception with that one. I'll just say the results were mixed from my perspective. Plus, the sunlight coming through the barn made for some horrendous backlighting issues at times, but I worked around it for the highlight video. Also, if you want a laugh, check out the maid of honor's toast at 13:40 of the reception video below. She wrote her own rap lyrics to an Eminem backbeat. Gutsy. Thanks again to Monica, Shawn and Monica's mother Yvonne for hiring me!
Also, thanks to Jean Lee at Legacy Springs, photographer Hannah Joy Brown of Joy Wildflower Photography and Adriel McCord from Effective Mobile DJ Service for making the day fun and easy. I'll be shooting another wedding this weekend. So stay tuned for more... Wedding season rolls on through the fall, and my latest wedding videography experience took me to a gorgeous lakeside location in White Pine, Tennessee.
The ceremony and reception for Ashton and Stephen Byrne were held at the bride's house, which was especially fortunate for the parents paying for the evening. It's also easy to see in the highlight video above that the mountains overlooking the lake made for a picturesque wedding experience for all who attended, and because the Tennessee football team played earlier that week on Thursday night, no one was missing the Vols during the wedding. Smart scheduling there. Once again, I shot the ceremony with the help of my wife Martha, but I was by myself with two cameras for everything else. I shot primarily with my Canon 70D during the earlier part of the night and switched over to the 5D for the low-light situations. I really tried to take advantage of having two cameras during the first dances, toasts and fireworks display. And yes, the fireworks were just as impressive in person. The bride had asked if I could give the video a bit of a bluegrass theme so I decided to use that for the reception portion of the video. Fortunately, they had hired a bluegrass duo for the night so I just spliced together some audio from songs they played during dinner. Add that to the strong soundbites from the pastor and those giving toasts, plus the quick interviews with the bride and groom, the video turned out probably as close as possible to what I had envisioned. Kudos to all for putting on a great night. Enjoy the look through my lens! As promised, here's the first wedding highlight video of the season: Mathew & Leelan Whaley. What a great, easy-going couple to shoot! They were so expressive with their emotions toward each other. My job was easy: keep them in frame and in focus and let them them tell the story with their face.
You will see early on in the video that Leelan wrote Mathew a lengthy love letter to read when he arrived at the venue. Whatever it said, it got him crying for the first of several times that day. They event was held at the gorgeous Swann Plantation, which is a bit of a hidden gem in Sevierville, TN. Homeowner Shari Coleman told me they are relatively new to hosting weddings, but they do an impressive job. At this wedding, the whole family seemed to be working whether it was coordinating, decorating, cooking, doing make-up, shuttling people to and from the parking lot, etc. Thanks to my wife, Martha, for helping with a second camera for the ceremony. She was on a Canon 5D in the back while I roamed around with a 70D on a monopod. There was also a GoPro Hero 4 Session mounted high up behind the pastors. Speaking of, the ultimate thanks goes to Sharrion Payne, the pastor who hired me to shoot the event! More wedding videos to come... |
AuthorJason Jennings is a freelance videographer based in Raleigh, NC. He previously spent more than a decade covering sports for television stations in Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Missouri. Archives
December 2018
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