Anyone who knows me and my wife knows we're always up for a party. And what parties consistently deliver free quality food and beverage for guests ages 25-and-up more than weddings?
My wife and I have attended dozens of wedding together. So much so, we will even make side bets: Who will be the first bridesmaid to cry? What's the over/under on the length of the sermon? Will "Uptown Funk" be played at the reception? If so, how many times? etc. So after considering myself a bit of an expert Wedding Guest, the transition to Wedding Videographer has become a fun and seamless learning experience. So far, I have shot a wedding each of the previous two weekends with a few more on the horizon this fall. In many ways, weddings are like shooting sports. You have one chance to get the shot., and every ceremony is like a game in that you can prepare where to position your camera to get the best shots but have to be ready to adjust on the fly. I've been able to cover the ceremonies with a Canon 5D on a tripod in the back on crowd, a GoPro placed behind the minister facing the bride and groom while I move around with my Canon 70D on a monopod to vary up the shots. I've also been able to cover most of the key points of the reception with the 5D on the tripod while I shoot with the 70D until the light gets too low and I switch up to just the 5D. Again, I've learned something with each shoot and am confident I'll have the routine down pat. Congratulations to Matthew & Leelan Whaley and Stephen & Ashton Byrne on their beautiful weddings, and thanks so much for letting me be a part of them! I'll be posting videos from them soon.
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Okay, so maybe it hasn't been too long since I've rushed to meet deadline for a local TV station.
This is a feeling where a little goes a long way. When you face that stress four or five times a week, it becomes burdensome and burns you out. That certainly happened to me in my TV career. It's like the old saying of, "Do you love ice cream? Ok, then can you eat it everyday for breakfast, lunch and dinner?" The beauty of doing what I'm doing now is in the variety. One day I'm shooting sports, the next day a wedding and then TV news the next. So I actually look forward to the deadline rush when I get it so infrequently now. This is all a roundabout way to bring up that last week, thanks to a freelance gig for WRCB out of Chattanooga, I once again got to put on the TV news photog glasses (in the form of an old-school Panasonic P2 camera borrowed from the station). The reason for the shoot was completely cringeworthy. If you dare, just google "Ooltewah basketball" and you will quickly see the juvenile court case that was being tried at the Sevier County courthouse. Anyway, we had our first of several live shots scheduled for 5pm. Problem was, the verdict of the case did not happen until after 4pm and we got our only interview with one of the attorneys around 4:30. Maybe later. The reporter, who was perfectly nice, was a starting to get more than a little concerned about making deadline. Perhaps in her mind, she would have to navigate through the editing/FTP/LiveU process herself. After all, we had just met that morning. She had never seen me in action. Not that I'm the Usain Bolt of turning content, and I was slightly out of practice, but this was nothing compared to the deadlines I would face everyday covering sports (especially as a one-man-band in Raleigh). Of course, everything went smoothly. Her laptop had Edius for editing and FileZilla for FTP, all things with which I was more than familiar. And the new LiveUs are simple enough for a 3rd grader to use (press a couple buttons, plug in a cable, and BOOM, you're live on the air). We knocked out every live shot while feeding content in between, and when it was over, the reporter was incredibly thankful for making her day less stressful. And I was thankful to be part of TV news rush for one day. Just not everyday.
I still think most of my education of shooting and editing came from when I was a kid shadowing my father while he shot high school football games. When I started shooting games myself, I already had a wealth of knowledge and experience from which to pull.
So while I see several of my colleagues posting from Rio on what has to be an incredibly rewarding and deserving experience covering the Olympics, believe it or not, there was no place I'd rather be last night than on the sidelines of two Knoxville area high schools. At this point, it looks like I'll be able to freelance for WBIR on a few Friday nights when they're a little short-handed. It was a bit of a challenge shooting with the smaller Sony NXCam Camcorder. I'm used to shooting football with larger cameras on the shoulder. While heavier (about 30 lbs.), the weight on my shoulder helps me balance the camera and allows me to shoot tighter and steadier. Then again, I guess it's just what I'm used to because it's how I learned. Anyway, I hope the highlights to last night's games between Alcoa vs. Webb and Jefferson County vs. Grace Christian Academy met the station's standards. It also happened to be one of those nights when all the highlights were going away from me. As much you can prepare and position yourself, it's still a guessing game there. Enjoy the highlights as they aired! I'm thrilled for the chance to produce some videos for Bike Elf, a local charity that donates renovated bikes to deserving area kids and young adults. Here's a quick look at Wednesday's successfully giveaway, where Bike Elf donated 25 bicycles at the Boys and Girls Club of Blount County.
More videos with Bike Elf to come later... I did a little traveling in June, and one of the trips included a visit to Siesta Key, Florida. The beach there is annually rated among the best in the country, and it's easy to see why.
Needing to pack light for my cheap flight down there, I only had room in my bags to take my GoPro Hero4 Session. No, it's not my best camera, but it certainly can get wet and beat up so I tried to make the most of it when capturing a gorgeous sunset on the beach. I hope I did it justice. Check out the video and see for yourself! 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.
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!
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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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