Swing!

King Of The Swingers (The Swing Ninjas) / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

A few weeks back I was approached by my coworkers J.Wong and R.Patel about a quick shoot that could help promote the swing dance club at work and potentially be used for talent acquisition purposes. Most of the people in the club were in my old group so I thought it’d be fun. Totally blown away when I went to one of their lunch meetings to do some scouting but once the beat dropped they really started doing their thing! It was really impressive!

Concept-wise I went back to an commercial from way back in the day. I remember being in 8th grade when this commercial hit and around this time my core teacher started up a swing club at our middle school. Never was any good at it and I remember more than a few close calls with my arm being bent in different directions. Still, I always loved the vibe and feel of swing so I was looking forward to this.

Here’s some of the test footage for reference. The dancers were all improving and so it was a bit tricky but necessary to get them used to the idea of repeating improved movements since I’d be shooting with a single camera on the day of the shoot. They all went back and brushed up their moves and threw in some new ones!

On the day of shooting, SD was a little warmer than usual, hitting highs of 95*C. Even though we were indoors the heat made the floors a little sticker but everyone was still super excited. It’s super apparent they’re having fun and I’m just there hitting record. Finally, a little color correction warmed the shoot a little. I tried to emulate a little of the eye popping red that is in the music video for Cissie Redwick’s “Gimme that Swing” (link)

Couple more videos coming out soon in quick succession. stay tuned!

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!