Tag: featured

Categories
Photography

Dinner with a Side of Design

Put on by my friend Kara Pecknold, Dinner with a Side of Design is an event “to engage local leaders and designers in collaborative conversations focused around the complex themes of sustainability, culture and economics.”

During the facilitated three-course dinner, participants will be able to dialogue through conversation and visualisation in order to investigate new ways to respond to these complex topics by applying the value of design to them. The tablecloth will be a conduit to allow for idea development and exchange. The aim is to investigate how a collaborative informal approach can help a community work collectively toward a common future. By treating complexity with a measure of comradery, and using design process and thinking, we propose that new and undetected ideas can emerge.

Categories
Video

The Wellspring Foundation PSA

(Alternate iPhone version)

In 2008, Lyn & Jesse Rosten and I headed to Rwanda to do the last round of filming for Rwanda: Hope Rises. Our hosts were our friends at the Wellspring Foundation for Education, a non-profit working in Rwanda toward quality education. They do the hard, everyday work of training teachers, educating kids and working with headmasters & the ministry of education to deliver the best possible education to Rwandan kids.

My friend and fellow creative Craig Harris just completed editing footage from that trip into a promotional film for Wellspring. The piece is a great example of collaboration at its best. A hard-working non-profit receives the combined efforts of several creative people, melded into a cohesive finished product. Have a look and let me know what you think in the comments!

Categories
Photography

Esther & Jason


Esther & Jason are a love story in progress. In late January I was able to spend a couple of hours with them on their wedding day. After a week of rain, it was the perfect shooting day. The sky was a rich blue, and a rainbow formed as the sun dipped below the horizon. We had a great time out in the cold and back at Cecil Green getting these shots. Enjoy!

Categories
Video

Olympic Torch Relay

This isn’t the type of work I’d normally feature here, but I’ve been prodded to give it a mention. The above video is an example of the result of the imaging workflow I helped to design for Vancouver 2010’s Olympic Torch Relay. Within a few hours of being shot, the above video was edited & available to broadcasters via satellite, to media (with stills) via the internet, and online via VANOC’s website. I worked with the team at Image Media Farm to craft the overall workflow, including video & photography ingest, data transfer and storage, editing & delivery via satellite and internet across the continent, and metadata retention and archival.

This is the largest Olympic relay yet, and it posed many design challenges. By the end of the relay, there will be 106 continuous days worth of video & photography, all of which had to be tagged and tracked for the more than 11,000 torch bearers and hundreds of cities & towns involved. The equipment had to withstand the harsh conditions of a trek across the Arctic and a travelling convoy back across the country… and all on a budget. Along with several parties needing different edited pieces out of the system and constantly changing requirements, it was a challenge – and one that I enjoyed thoroughly. Hats off to the media team on the road who do the hard daily work of putting this together.

Categories
Off the Blog Quotes

John Maeda on Finding The Way

Finding the right way starts with choosing a way.

— John Maeda

Categories
Photography

Joshua Tree Panoramas

Palm Springs Wind Turbines Pano
Salton Sea Panorama

Just back from two days with a good friend, enjoying nothing but the quiet of the wind and the rocks under our feet in Joshua Tree National Park. The trip was (purposefully) undocumented, except for a few stops to make these pano’s.

Categories
Quotes

Sartre on Story

…everything changes when you tell about life… things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start from the beginning: “It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a notary’s clerk in Maromme.” And, in reality, you have started at the end…

The end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story… we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure.

We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in a night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull, rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Categories
Video

Rwanda: Hope Rises Trailer

Trailer for the documentary Rwanda: Hope Rises. More info and DVDs for sale here.

Categories
Video

Bulembu Promo

In August 2008 I travelled to Bulembu, my second trip to this small town in Swaziland, Africa. I had been a few months previously, on a photography assignment (you can see some here and here). This time, I was directing a film of the Canadian Tenors as part of the Voices for Bulembu campaign. The eventual result was this promotional video, and a mini-documentary of the Tenor’s experiences (see it here). Both films were shown as part of a series of gala events to raise money for the work of the Bulembu Foundation. It was a great success, with almost one million dollars raised over a single weekend.

Through my involvement in Bulembu I’ve gained many lifelong friends, and become part of a significant effort to transform this struggling nation. It has been a great privilege.

Many thanks to those involved. Post-production on the videos was by Jon at EXE Productions. Cinematography was by the talented Jonny Beecher. Special thanks to Kelly Walker for producing both trips and to the team at the Bulembu Foundation for their transformative work.

Categories
Video

YMCA Youth Peace Network PSA

A recent project for The YMCA of Greater Vancouver.

We had a very tight timeline, and an even tighter budget, but we managed to pull it all together — just in time for the YPN’ers farewell dinner. A great group of youth to interact with (and a great program!) Check it out for yourself…