This vlog is from my books website and it’s number four in a series of five.
Blog
Vlog: Shooting Commercials on Challenging Locations
The business of shooting commercials can be dull and boring or interesting and challenging. The work I did for N Lee Lacy Associates as Don Guy’s producer was always the latter.
Lots more tales of this sort will be found in my second and third books, Circumstances Beyond My Control and Waiting for Elizabeth.
Video Editing “Jet Song” x 3
A year or so ago my friend Grover Dale, who was a member of the West Side Story original cast and has directed regional productions of the show, came across a video of women performing The Jet Song. It was choreographed by Galen Hooks.
Grover loved the idea of women doing this piece and shared it on facebook. This gave me an idea. It would be cool to combine the three variations in one video. Being unable to download the Hooks version I set up a camera in front of my HDTV and shot it.
My video presented here is a mix of the 1961 movie, Grover Dale’s 2008 Dallas production and Ms Hooks’ female version. (I do not have Hooks’ permission to use hers but rather than exploitation, this video is a tribute.)
(Click the YouTube button and watch it full screen.)
I hope you enjoyed it.
Obama Love
I created this visual tribute to President Barack Obama and his beautiful family. We miss them all very much.
“A Pledge to Love” which is read at the end, was written by Elizabeth Hepburn. Please share. Thanks, BB
Mac Repair in The City
I’m a Mac guy. Since my first Mac (a Performa) May 1996 I have owned nine more. I have loved them all from when I got one of the first G4s in March 2000 and used it solely for editing with Final Cut Pro (v1.0) through the refurbished 17” Mac Book Pro I acquired in December 2015. This one I use for internet, writing, bookkeeping and everything else including editing.
Loved the Beach-ball!
In these twenty-one Mac years I have had very few problems all of which were easily and inexpensively fixed until a few weeks ago. The 17” Mac Book Pro began acting weird, abrupt shutdowns, strange “fuzzy” screens etc. Having learned with my thirteen year old Beach-ball iMac that Apple won’t touch a machine that’s over five years old and Tekserve out of business I went to the web and found Laptop MD.
This was a stroke of luck. To make a long story short, these guys are excellent. I researched them on line and then went to their place on West 35th Street in Manhattan. When I walked through their door I was reassured. The place reeked of competence and that feeling was borne out by the instant diagnosis of my problem. Replacing a motherboard ain’t cheap but their price was fair and they delivered ahead of schedule.
The icing on the cake with Laptop MD is that a while after their repair I bought some additional RAM and when I was ready to install it no matter how hard I tried and with what tool, I couldn’t get the tiny screws out of the back in order to remove it and install the memory. I sent them an email describing my problem and the owner of the company said bring it down. I did. The tech easily got the screws out and coached me through the installation, closed it up and wished me well. No charge.
So if you ever have a problem with any computer (including Windows machines), tablet or phone you won’t find a better solution than Laptop MD in New York City.
Thanks to Matt Ham and his crew. They don’t wear shirts proclaiming themselves “geniuses” they just get the job done.
Video Production and Editing Rick Skye
When I wasn’t busy with the
video production and editing
on one of the large Creative Entertainment projects (Nyack to 9th Avenue, The Better & Better Series or Birth of the Music Video) I worked with a few clients who were performing artists. Most were fun and challenging projects. *
Some of my most fun gigs came from multi-MAC award winner Rick Skye. When I met him in 2002 he was looking for a video guy to shoot his show and make a demo. Rick came to meet me and look at some of my work. The first thing he said to me when we met: “I’m not a drag queen. I’m a writer and actor and I ‘do’ Liza Minnelli.”
Over the next several years I shot several of his shows and created three or four demos and we became friends. Rick appears on many pages of my third memoir book Waiting for Elizabeth.
Video Production & Editing Vlog Sliza from Ben Bryant on Vimeo.
He was constantly improving his Slice O’ Minnelli show. In May of ‘06 he came up with a new project. He was preparing an expanded show for a run in London’s West End and a festival in Edinburgh. Both sites would have large video projection screens. A new feature of his show was that he had two major costume changes that each took several minutes. He needed video to cover them.
You’ll find much more about Rick and many other fun tales of video production and editing when you click here and get Waiting for Elizabeth.
* This Vlog was previously posted on entertainmentbooksbyben.com.
TV Commercial Production Trailer for my Book
TV Commercial Production is the principle subject of Circumstances Beyond My Control, the second volume of my memoirs. Here’s the trailer.
Circumstances Beyond My Control is filled with stories and adventure tales from my 25 years as a freelance producer and 1st AD in film, mainly in the production of over a thousand TV commercials.
Click here to get Circumstances Beyond My Control.
Snow in New York City
Snow is very nice in
New York City.
But I won’t be sad to see the end of winter.
When the snow is falling it’s clean or at least it appears to be clean. I live in New York City and when the snow is falling and for a few hours or so – or even as long as a day after it stops – the city seems to sparkle.
And the new snow has a wonderful effect on people. They smile, occasionally laughing in the streets and in the park strangers actually talk with one another.
The snow imposes a temporary quiet on the city, another desirable quality in a place this populated. You don’t hear the snow coming down as you do rain and it not only mutes the almost constant noise but if it’s heavy enough it actually stops the racket for a day or two. Then of course the garbage trucks with their snow plow blades come out and they are very noisy but it’s reassuring kind of noise.
For more tales of New York City, Celebrities, film and TV production and editing click here to get my “Entertainment Books”.