While I teach a lot of video skills, I make videos too, including shooting, editing, title design, colour correction and finishing. To see some of my videos, head to filmeverywhere.com.
Here's a quick showcase of some of my motion graphics work over the past few years.
I was interviewed for and appear in Bradley Olsen's documentary, "Off The Tracks", about the launch of Final Cut Pro X and what's happened since. I also contributed video and stills (of the Apple campus and behind the scenes at the filming of MacBreak Studio) which appear in the movie. Many other people also appear in the doco, including the original creator of FCP 7/FCP X/iMovie/Premiere, Randy Ubillos. You can buy it now from the official movie website.
I designed funwithstuff Annotator, for sale through FxFactory, including hand-drawing hundreds of live-animated shapes. The plug-in is designed for Final Cut Pro editors to use in their educational and promotional videos.
Clients have included multinationals, large organisations, government departments, universities, manufacturers and training organisations. Many of these clips are online at filmeverywhere.com, though many more cannot be shared, and I'd have to show you in person.
One I can share is a Fire and Evacuation video that I shot (with a colleague) and edited. It's presented by Bruce Paige, and is part of a training course that's for sale here.
For CoreMelt, I've created many tutorial and promotional videos like this one, as well as helping during development and performing some logo and print design. I continue to work for CoreMelt today, and also write for the fcpxfree.com site, discussing free effects for Final Cut Pro X.
In 2015, I flew to Las Vegas to present on the CoreMelt stand on the show floor at NAB, and at the FCPWORKS sessions next door. That session is online here.
Airport is an animated film I finished in 2005, then put on my website to no acclaim. It was accepted into the Sydney Film Festival in 2005, where it played in the Oz Digital Shorts program in the Sydney Opera House. Sadly, that just meant that a hundred or so more people saw it.
Down the track in 2006, I volunteered to show Cory Doctorow (sci-fi author, boingboing.net editor and all-round good guy) around Brisbane while he was in town to give a speech, and he accepted. At the end of the day I passed on my showreel, he liked Airport, linked to it, and it became an instant hit. From there, it was invited to the Portable Film Festival in 2006, where it eventually came joint second behind an Oscar nominee (Maestro), and Bitfilm in Germany. Stills from the film have also been featured in the Graphic Design Referenced book.
With my daughter, I created a short film in which she said a line of the Shakespeare speech "All The World's A Stage" every now and again for eighteen months, mostly using props or settings that reflected the line. It became a minor viral hit in August 2014, featured in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, but interestingly, Benedict Cumberbatch voiced a very similar piece (the same speech, starting with very similar orchestral music) for a BBC promo that came out a few months later in October. Coincidence? Possibly.
My short animation Airport, mentioned elsewhere on this page, was seen by someone from Microsoft who was organising Tech·Ed 2006, and who liked the animation style. I was commissioned to create an animation to open the conference, and then to fly to Boston to make another film there (which remains private).
There's a great story about a film called Radio Pirates that I worked on the press kit for, and then another story about another film by the same director, but maybe it's best to ask me about this one in person.
My art project Identikit was eventually reborn as a 3D project and taught to schoolkids in a workshop. The idea was then taken further, and broadened out to include more than just pictures, to create a game show that went to pilot. Perhaps someday it'll be picked up? (If you'd like to see the video, you'll have to ask me, though.)
Take twelve five-second shots, put them together with music at 96 or 192 bpm, and you've got a Twelve Fives video postcard, a great way to show your old footage. Several of the pieces I've made have been shown in exhibition at QUT in Brisbane.
This has now morphed into a way to record a child growing up a year in a minute, and my daughter's life is slowly turning into a 21 minute video to be shown at her 21st birthday party.
Way back in 1991, I shot video all year on a VHS camcorder, then edited on a VHS-Umatic tape-to-tape machine in a tiny utility room to avoid an English assignment, and made the Senior Video. It was a blast, and the tradition continues today.