We’ve teamed up with Biznik to produce a series of short videos spotlighting innovative businesses and thinkers in Seattle. The first installment launched over the weekend, featuring a local cabinet making company.

Lisa and I are producing these videos quickly (one day of shooting and editing completed within a few days), but without sacrificing too much on quality (you won’t see any shaky handheld camera work in our stuff, for example). Everything done with a crew of two, and all the gear we can stuff into a Nissan Leaf. Lisa directs and produces; I shoot and edit. Although Lisa also did a fair bit of b-roll shooting on this as well.

For this piece we used four lights – a Smith Victor 650-watt open-face light through a medium soft box for the interview with Lowel Pro-light for rim light; and a pair of CN-900 LED lite panels for lighting him in his office. The rest was all shot with available light in the well-lit factory.

It was also the first piece on which I got a chance to use my new Sennheiser 8060 shotgun mic, and it’s a dandy. Jeff’s voice comes through really rich and warm and needed very little EQ adjustment in post (just added a tiny bit on the high end in a few of the clips to get them to match). Everything they say about this mic is true: it makes whoever’s talking sound great, is tuned to bring forward human speech from the environment, and rejects sound from the sides without coloration. What more can I say? Oh, it’s tiny, light, and will probably last for 20 years.

We’re ramping up to do a lot of these in coming days and excited about the challenge of making business videos that are easy to watch and ultimately inspiring.

When Lisa and I began shooting Beyond Naked last year, we wondered if anything was happening at the exact opposite celestial time of year from that other Solstice, which would become the climax of our film. We got wind of a strange bunch of people who ride all night long on that darkest of evenings, and we knew we had to meet them.

Ride organizer Joe Platzner graciously allowed us to follow him and his posse though the night. It was a great adventure, and we met some amazing people. Two of them, Greg Cox and Andy Speier, later joined our filmmaking team on June 18 and made a big contribution to our successful event coverage. Some of the footage we shot during this ride will likely also appear in the film, which we’re currently editing.

I cut this video to help promote this year’s ride (although I can’t imagine why they’d have any trouble finding people to join them!) If you’re interested in learning more, check out their site at http://www.seattlerandonneur.org.

This is a seriously smart project. The more I think about it, there are a lot of situations where this would obviate my need to haul around a 3-foot long cineslider. And just a little controlled movement can really go a long way to adding polish to footage of all kinds, from quick iPhone grabs to carefully rehearsed DSLR shoots. I’m in!

I’m happy to announce the launch of a commercial piece we have completed for the Seattle Interactive Conference. For this video, Lisa and I interviewed 6 leaders in the local interactive scene, all of whom will be speaking at the first-ever conference in November. Since we had no footage from past events on which to draw, we went straight to the people who will be speaking at the event, and had a wide-ranging conversation about interactivity. Here’s the results:

Special thanks to Adam Sheppard of 8Ninths and Jamie Monberg of Hornall Anderson, who provided us with a substantial amount of the footage we used in cutting the video. And to the rest of the very busy people – Ed Fries, Vanessa Fox, and Shauna Causey – who made time for us and our equipment.

Tech details: We shot all the interviews on location with a two-person crew, myself (camera and editing) and Lisa (sound and production). I shot with Canon 60D, using a CN-900 LED as key light (a great light for traveling with, which I’ll blog about soon). I cut the piece on Final Cut Pro X 10.1, which is definitely more stable than the previous version. The biggest gripe I have about FCPX in the wake of finishing this piece, is a minor one: it’s tedious to color correct similar clips, because I found that cutting and pasting effects such as color corrections is unreliable when I had complex masks, audio filters, and third-party filters such as Magic Bullet Mojo, which I used to squeeze skin tones.

The opening shot I grabbed with my Canon S95 last Christmas on a family trip, as we were landing in Kito, Ecquador. Proving once again that the best camera is the one you have with you. After today’s big Apple announcement, I’m sure I’m not the only filmmaker lusting to have that be an iPhone 4s.

My friend Tiberio Simone performed at Vermillion art gallery last Thursday. The place was packed. In Seattle at least, Tiberio’s art clearly has legs!

I shot this short video with help from Lisa Cooper, who recorded audio. I cut it over the weekend with Final Cut Pro X. Music is from “Postcards in Full Color” CD by Max Richter, available on iTunes.

This is a fantastic interview, which answers a lot of the questions I had after watching what is my favorite documentary of the year, Exit Through the Gift Shop. I was particularly interested in how the film went from concept to completion structurally, and Chris goes a long way to answering that question in this excellent interview.

I finished editing this film last week, and it’s now public. It’s the third of four short films I am making that promote Eton School, a Montessori School in Bellevue. The kids and staff at this school made creating this piece a real pleasure.