Photos from Home

I took a much needed trip home to Ypsilanti this past weekend and here are some photos documenting my trip.

Storage Boxes

For some time now I've been looking for a storage solution for the miscellaneous junk I have in my office and have had to resign to using an unsightly shoe box to hold it all. Recently I found a couple of nicer looking boxes at Salvation Army to use. They originally had some sort of built in calendar filing system, but I tore that out and just use them for storage.

Below is the box for "Office Supplies," otherwise known as random junk. I also created labels for them with a stamp set.

The second box I used for "Audio Equipment," like my XLR adapter, XLR cable, and headphones I have for my video camera.They also needed a home and had previously just been left lying out or shoved into my video camera's bag.

                                      

"The Missing Children" Improv Performance

I recently shot a performance of my friend's improv group, The Missing Children, at the Playground Theater here in Chicago. Below is the group's performance in its entirety. Soon, I will be editing it down to create a promotional video for the group to help them get more gigs.



The Missing Children- 5/3/2010 from Trevor Walters on Vimeo.

Web Page

I've been working on designing a web page to host my portfolio of video projects I've done and I guess I can say that at this point it's mostly complete. I still would like to register my own domain name and, of course, continue to improve the actual material on the site, but this is what I have for now:

Trevor Walters' Video Portfolio

Demo Reel

I had an interview for an internship earlier in the week, and while it turned out not to be what I was looking for, it did finally motivate me to put something together for a demo reel. Ideally, the purpose of having an internship would be to build a more impressive demo reel, but for now I slapped together a basic DVD menu with links to a film trailer made in Premiere Pro, an animated DVD menu created in AfterEffects, and a short film made using Final Cut Pro. If nothing else, the works show that I have basic competency in video editing, but putting it together really affirmed by belief that the works I have aren't going to be very impressive to a prospective employer.

Previously, I've always created projects where the focal point wasn't in how it was edited, so my new goal is to find a way to take existing footage and edit it in a more impressive way. Still trying to figure out how to go about doing that.

Fairfield Script

I've been primarily using this blog for visual projects, but since writing Fairfield has been a major project of mine since the end of 2006/beginning of 2007, and has again become my main focus approaching 2010, it seems wrong not to mention it on a blog about projects I'm working on.

I began the planning stages of Fairfield around the end of 2006 and wrote the original script for a class in my final semester at SFSU in 2007. I always wrote it with the intention to film it, which is a privilege not many writers get, and one that helps me greatly through the writing process since I can visualize who's going to be playing who, and can really hear a specific character's voice while I write. My previous film, Phat Tony, really lacked in the performance of the actors, and I don't feel that it was as much of a fault with the people in it, as it was a fault of poor casting on my end. In Phat Tony, I only thought visually of who would be good for the role, instead of thinking about actual personalities. I think the casting was greatly improved between the two films, and being able to have a casted film while writing it really helps with writing dialogue, especially for the more colorful characters like L Teezy Mac and Bruce in Fairfield.

christmas crafts

I've been spending a lot of my free-time recently working on my script, but Mary and I found some time on Thanksgiving to make stockings for ourselves for Christmas. Mine is the one on the right with the snowflakes. Mostly I like how large they are to fit lots of gifts.



We also made a wreath with a felt bison on it. The leaves were made from PBR cans that we cut into leaf-shapes and then painted green. Originally, i was going to put the bison on the stocking, but decided it just wasn't going to fit aesthetically. Since i already had the bison outline ready though, it was the logical solution for what to make the center-piece of the wreath.