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Heather & Hua


Location: San Gabriel, California

John, over at Simplytwo and I had a chance to work together to capture Heather and Hua’s big day. There were 2 moments that I did not capture that day that really stick in my mind and caught me off guard.

In the morning as we’re getting ready and you see the bride getting ready in the video, what you don’t see is downstairs Heather’s mom and her mom’s friends are cooking up a storm. It’s going to be a party and these ladies can cook! They’ve got the old school propane burners and woks downstairs and the smell wafts upstairs to where we were seated. It was like a mix of paradise and torture. While the bridal party headed out for the rest of the day’s festivities, Heather’s parents were enjoying their feast. Jealous!

Hua grew up with Craig (best man) here in San Diego and Craig flew in from Australia for this big day. As we sat in the hotel after the tea ceremony, Craig was talking to Hua’s parents and I happened to catch part of the conversation. I realized Craig’s speaking Spanish (Craig is Latino) and I’m thinking “wow, Hua’s parents (who are Chinese) are incredibly kind and patient” because they’re just nodding and smiling. Suddenly, Hua’s dad starts responding in super fluent Spanish too! My jaw dropped. This wasn’t slow, high school level Spanish, this was 100 mph fluency. Amazing.

Those were two of the many moments in the day that stick out in my mind. The rest of the day flew by like a blur and I’ve recreated the feeling with a focus on the moments we’ll look back and remember years from now. So enjoy…and don’t blink!

New Year. New Blog. New Ways. New Things.


Hey guys! Happy new year again!

It’s been a while since a meaningful update has occurred and  it gives me such great pleasure to unveil this new website. My site over at kreptonic.wordpress.com is still up for now. This has been quite an incredible learning experience and there is so much more to learn.

So please have a poke around and let me know what you think! And if any of you is a wordpress/web expert, please let me know!

It also gives me immense pleasure to release my latest music video project. It’s the return to the screen for an artist. I’ll leave the introduction for him to disclose at another time.

Backstory:

I’ve been a big fan of this song for a long time now. It’s never been released (you heard it here first!) but whenever I heard that opening stanza I always imagined we’d shoot this video at an airport. Problem is that security at airports are crazy and you can’t just walk into an airport and start recording stuff.

Soundtrak and I are both from the bay area and we bump into each other on the same flights quite a few times. Every time we do we start talking about video ideas. This time flying back over xmas break we happened to be on the same flight again and this time I happened to have my gear with me. The flight was also originally delayed an hour but then moved back up to its original time so we suddenly would have some time at the tail end to shoot if this was gonna happen. 

The whole thing almost fell apart because in order to shoot it, we needed the middle seat on the plane to be empty to have a space in between us. We put a bag in between our chairs and it felt like that forrest gump moment on the bus when a person walks by and we’d have to say “seats taken”. Fortunately we didn’t have to, plane was empty enough

By the time we got to San Jose we had an empty terminal and just had a blast shooting this. I hope you all enjoy it and send Soundtrak some love…he’s itching to get back into doing music and videos. Share it around!

10th annual CEC Harvest Festival

10 years seems like a long time.

In 2003 the first annual CEC harvest festival was born out of a desire to reach and serve the Linda Vista community.  10 years later we are making headway. We’ve come a long ways from just commuting in on Fridays/Sundays and leaving afterwards.

But we can be more.

Who will lead us?