We ventured up to Calumet yesterday to shoot a little promotional video footage of Pastyfest 2008.  I must admit that Jessie and I didn't know much about Pastyfest going into the event, but we were both looking forward to learning more about this annual festival.

Since pastyfest was an all day event, we had originally planned on splitting up the shoot schedule between us, I would take the Parade in the morning and Jessie would cover the fun in the park in the afternoon, but curious got the better of the both of us, so we decided that we would make a day of it together.

Jessie is not much of a morning person, especially when she was out relaxing at an Adam and Robyn Johnson's BBQ the night before until 2AM in the morning.  Yes, I was at the BBQ also, but I called it quits and when home around midnight.  Despite running a little shy on sleep, Jessie is always ready to pull her share of the load (as you can see above, about 30lbs of gear).  I could have helped her out a little I suppose, but I wanted to take pictures ... so I was just carrying the camera.

We invited Stephenie, a lovely young lady we are working with this summer, along to help us shoot, gain experience with video gear and learn about walking up and interviewing complete strangers. 

The picture to the right shows Stephenie setting up our Canon GL2, a camera she had never worked with before.  There is nothing like a little on the job training. 

We started with the Parade, Jessie shot video using the Canon XL2, Stephenie shot video using the Canon GL2 and I pretty much just roamed the 5th street taking photographs.  I've come to trust Jessie's artistic eye and technical ability with the XL2, so I was completely relaxed and just having a good time taking in the parade and the crowed and everything the event had to offer.

Pastyfest is truly a fun-for-the-whole-family type of event.  It was a little chilly and windy in the morning, but that didn't stop the families from pouring out in number - children, parents, grandparents, great grandparents; they were all there kicking their day off right with the parade. 

The kids are super-cute, click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Standing outside for an hour left our bones a little chilly so we headed down to the always popular Conglomerate Cafe for a cup of coffee and a piece of their super delicious home-made strawberry-rhubarb pie.  Yum!  You must try it!

By late morning the sun had finally arrived wisping away the dark clouds making for absolutely perfect weather the activities going on at Agassiz Park. 

The park was pouring over with music, food, little shops and fun.  Of course there were pasties and pasties.  The picture to the right shows just a couple of pasties that were submitted in the pasty competition.  Just watching the judges at work was making me hungry (in fact its making me hungry right now).

There was so much going on, it was difficult choosing where to start shooting.  Jessie was in the mood take photographs, so I manned the XL2 for a while and ran off to get some up close footage and interviews.

Stephenie and I had some fun later with interviews.  I would give her some tips on walking up to a complete stranger, sticking a camera lens in their face and then compelling them to give a little testimony.  After a couple of tries, she was really getting the hang of it.  I've learned if you're friendly, confident, a little funny and genuine, most of the time people will talk on camera for you.

All in all we had a great day shooting and walking around pastyfest.  We took a lot of great video which we're going to edit into a promotional piece which will hopefully help get the word out about pastyfest and help make it even a better event next year.

If you are interested in knowing more about Pastyfest, visit the Main Street Calumet web site.  A big thanks goes out to Tom Tikkanen for getting us involved.  We had a great shoot and look forward to next year's Pastyfest activities.

Our good friend Mark Geborkoff of "The Outlaws" asked us come and record their performance at the historic Ontonagon Theater.  I was pretty excited about the opportunity.  I hadn't been to Ontonagon for years and I had never even heard of The Ontonagon Theater of Performing Arts.  As you can see, its a beautiful theater with an updated lighting and sound system. 

Outlaws were definitely crowd pleasers  rockin' the stage with their Johnny Cash like sound and style.  Here are some photos of their show...

Jessie worked the XL2 from the balcony and I worked the floor using the GL2 and snapping photos.  Ray Bosley was along with us on this one... you can check out his photos of the event here.

When one of our customers told us they wanted female narrative voice-over for one of their promotional video projects, the very first person that came to mind was Mary Tober.  It had been years since I worked with Mary so I was really execited about the possibility of working with her again.

Voice-over work can be very interesting.  I'm always on the look out for someone with an interesting sounding voice, but just having a cool voice isn't enough.  You're looking for a "reader", somebody who can read at a tempo, with good pronunciation and intonation, and with the right amount of inflection to suit the projects needs.  I've spent hours recording people with great voices that were not very good readers and then spent hours more trying to edit the audio into something usable.

I wasn't expecting any of these problems with Mary Tober.  Now Mary is no amateur when it comes to voice of work.  She's been broadcasting live on the air waves for many years.  She is boiling over with energy and experience.  In fact, it took me longer to set up the micrphone then it did for Mary to do a couple of practice runs and then nail the recordings one the first take, even with the reading full of industrial terms and language.  Amazing!  Pro!

Mary was just doing a few test reads today, quick and dirty to test videos we're putting together.  You can take a list to the recordings we made here (mp3 format):

Test Recording #1
Test Recording #2

You can also check out the test video that makes use of the first voice-over recording:

If you are interested in working with Mary, drop her an e-mail at marytober1@yahoo.com.

Man that was a busy weekend. But sure was fun. We started out bright and early on Saturday  on a shoot for the annual Keweenaw Chain Drive Festival (see Todd's earlier blog post here).

My co-worker Arnie was generous enough to volunteer himself and his truck to haul Todd so Todd could get the lead racers in action during the first 3 miles of the race. Then Todd rendevoused with Truman Obermeyer (yep, the musher from our Dog Sled production) to hitch a ride on his ATV and get to the more remote spots of the course.

Meanwhile, I drove out to Christensen Road with Stephanie (a talented young lady that we hope to work with through the summer) and Emily (one of Brockit's interns). We parked on Christensen Road and hiked back to Beaver Dam Hugger Bridge a part of the trail that sweeps newly erected beaver dam.



We waited for the first wave of 16-mile racers. Then worked backwards, stopping along the way to shoot racers.

We ended up at a trail called Pow Pow. I can't wait to post some of the video we got from there. Good stuff.

Father's Day weekend is fast approaching and with it comes the annual Chain Drive mountain bike race sponsored by Portage Health.  This race (actually three races, a 16 mile, 32 mile and kids race) is a whole lot of fun and Jessie and I are going to be on the trails video taping it this year.  We're fired up!  There is nothing quite as exciting as shooting live outdoor sporting events.

Perhaps the largest challenge of recording races on backwoods trails is simply the logistics of getting the cameras where they need to be ahead of the racers.  To keep things interesting we want to shoot in as many locations as possible, which means moving around on a trail system (usually by foot or on an ATV) without disturbing the racers or messing up the trail system itself.  The racers are fast, sometimes really fast, traveling upwards of 25mph on single and two track trails.  So we have to have a solid shooting plan in advance or we could miss some great shots.

Luckily, local racers like Ed Kraai (depicted above), are tremendously generous with their time; taking us into the woods to investigate great locations for shooting and the best routes to get between these locations.  Above, is a shot of Ed riding along the waterfront of the Portage Canal in Hancock, MI.

The trail systems are beautiful in the Keweenaw and its no surprise that we ran into quite a few bikers - everyone knows each other of course - and if you are a newbie to the trails, its not long before you'll know everyone too.

A big thanks goes out to Ed for helping us map out locations and routes for video taping the 2008 Portage Health Keweenaw Chain Drive Festival on June 14. 

Christine Young and Lori Hauswirth are the Co-Directores of the Chain Drive and the race is held o the on the Churning Rapids/Maasto Hiito trail system.

When Adam Johnson asked us to run the sound and stage for the Houghton Spring Art and Music Festival, I said "sure, no problem".  After all, we had a pretty good sized PA just sitting in storage.  What's the point of having a large sound system if you don't use it once in a while?

If you know me, you know that I don't like to get caught with my pants down.  I tend to prepare - actually over prepare - for anything were other people are going to be counting on me.  The first thing I did was bust out the old 32 channel mixing board - a piece of equipment that I had done little more than trip over for the past five years - just to see if it would power on.  Now this thing has a lot of knobs and jacks and I went through each and everyone to see if they still worked.  Most did work, some needed a little TLC, and a few... well... I just couldn't remember what they were supposed to do in the first place.

I also dug up our old 100' snake, which is used to extend the reach of the mixing board to a stage that was up to 100' away.  Now this snake had spend the last 8 years living on the floor in Ray Bosley's garage.  I fully expected it to be a rusted out piece of $#!@$, but to my surprise, ever channel worked perfectly.  Cool!  You can see the stage end of the "snake" sitting to the right of the mixing board below.

Now that I'm older and wiser (in other words I've learned to use Google), I performed a little research and discovered that I've been under powering my speakers for, oh, well... my entire life.  I was unsuccessful in my attempts to locate a power amp to rent or borrow, so I ended up investing over $350 in a new 2500W EuroPower EP2500 power amp.  Like I said, I don't like to let people down and I knew I was going to come up short without beefing up my rig a little - at least my "under power" problem was solved.  (EuroPower amps are not the best in the world, but they do provide clean power at about half-the price of a more main-stream amp, like a QSC).

Technical Note:  It is really not possible to "under-power" a speaker.  That is to say, you can't wreck a speaker by giving it too little juice anymore than you can wreck a car engine by under-revving it.  What you can do, however, is expect too much sound (power) from your power amps and end up over-driving them.  When a power-amp enters an over-driven state (meaning the input signal is continuously maxed out), it can react by delivery 3 to 4 times its rated power and unexpectedly "over-power" the speakers thus burning them out.  So under-powering is really just freaking out your amp with ends up over-powering the speaker.

In addition to being responsible for the stage and sound at the arts festival, I was performing with on of the groups, Hannah Bethel.  Fortunately, this created an opportunity for me to test out the state of the PA equipment before the show.  So we set everything up in my garage and I was able to test out the equipment.  See below.  Hmmm... maybe I should wipe some of that equipment down.

Now I never would have been able to pull of this gig by myself.  There was simple too much equipment to move, too many wires to run, too many things to keep tract of, and most certainly too little time for it all to happen.  Basically, we had to arrive early, setup stage rises, speakers, amps, the mixing board, a dozen microphones and a drum kit.  We needed to get everything wired up and tuned in, which we did just as the first of six bands that would be performing that day arrived.

Mark Lucier was a savior.  He provided the drum kit and drum microphones, helped set everything up and tear everything down, and stuck by my side the entire day helping the bands get on and off stage, as well as, debate with me all day about how the bass drum should sound.

Mark Lucier and Adam Johnson fighting with the risers, but don't worry, they had a secret weapon this year - the instructions!  Adam, who just strikes me as being the slightest bit accident prone, escaped the grueling setup unscathed this year.  Below mark is "deploying" highly organized microphone cables to mic up his drum kit.  (or maybe he's untangling my cable mess, its hard to be sure).

Another life savior was, Ray Bolsey, who worked tirelessly throughout the day setting up equipment, troubleshooting problems, routing and re-routing microphone cables and just helped keep things moving smoothing.  Depicted below is Raymo setting up instrument microphones and labeling them so we could identify them from across the room.

This would be a great time to mention that I personally own one microphone, just one.  Well... that's not entirely true... I actually own more like a half-dozen microphones of various shapes and sizes, but only one of those is appropriate for stage work.  Learning that I needed to have eight microphones and eight stands on stage caught me a little of guard (I suppose it shouldn't have, but it did).

I ended up purchase two Shure SM57s and six microphone stands, but that's about all my financial stomach could handle.  Thanks to the generosity of local musicians like Mike Labeau of the Blackflies and Marc Geborkoff of The Outlaws who generously donated equipment for the festival, we were able to pull together everything we needed for the day.

That's me about donig something with that EQ, who knows what exactly.

All in all, thanks to a lot of hard work from a lot of people, the Houghton Spring Art and Music Festival Stage Show was a huge success.  The day was not without its glitches, but with help from people like Mark Lucier, Ray Bosley, Adam Johnson, Mike Labeau and others, the music kept flowing.

I like to put a special thanks out there to Mike Labeau and Adam Johnson for manning the sound board while I performed on stage with Hannah Bethel.  I was releaved to know we had a couple of seasoned musicians making sure we sounded great.  Its all about the audience and we wanted to give them the best show we could.

Just one more photo of Jessie relaxing at the art festival listening to the bands.

Family bowling has been taken to a whole new level at the recently opened Mine Shaft in Houghton, MI.  Its the sort of place you would expect to find in the city, bowling, dining and an arcade all under one roof (let's not forget the go-carts and mini-golf out back).  Jessie and I have eaten there a half-dozen times already and even bowled a few games on Portage Health family fun day.  we've also played our share of video games.

Thanks to Karyn Hanks of Segno Marketting, our little company Brassard Media is in on promoting this new business.  So today we spent a very exciting day shooting video of bowling in the lanes, game playing in the huge arcade, and fine dining in the rock house restaurant.  Karyn was on-site to give direction, Brian Parmeter was the photographer (see picture), along with a ton of models and staff to help make the day possible.  Everyone worked together to make an extensive day of shooting possible.

Well... I would love to write some more about out adventures today, but my loving wife Jessie (the boss of me) is telling me to come to bed and get some rest.  Love, honor and obey right? 

Hannah Bethel is an amazingly talented up and coming singer/song-writer who performed at our wedding reception in september, 2007 (toddandjessie.com).  Hannah is just wrapping up her high school days and will be moving on in the fall to the prestigious Belmont University in Nashville, TN enrolled in their school of music.  Hannah required not only strong academics to be accepted at Belmont, but actually had to go down to Nashville and audition.

We first stumbled across hannah at the houghton county fair during the summer of 2007.  Jessie and I were just wandering around nibbling on sweets when our ears were graced with some uncannily beautiful music drifting on the wind.  We followed the music and found a young 17-year old girl alone on a huge stage just belting out songs.  We later learned that she had written many of the songs that she was performing.  It wasn't until sometime later that we reaized how great it would be to have her perform at our wedding.  We were so excited by the idea that we just needed to contact her instantly.

Hannah agreed to perform at our wedding and in return we agreed to produce a country music video, a first for both of us.  Hannah was absolutely amazing at our wedding.  As we look back at the photos and video we could tell that everyone was just amazed by how much talent was packaged into this young lady.  And we did start shooting for the country music video, but then winter came and the project was put on hold until spring.

Recently Alex - Mr. G to his students - asked if i wanted to get together to play a pep rally (yes a pep rally) at the local high school.  We would perform some cover songs, but also some of Hannah Bethel's originals.  So we pulled a group of local musicians together, Alex on guitar, Ray Bosley on keyboards, Mark Lucier on drums and me on bass.  Hannah lead the band with vocals and guitar playing of her own.  We pulled off the pep rally, Hannah was a hit.  We could tell she has a lot of great friends in her class at school.

But the story is not over.  I think Hannah really enjoys having her music backed by a full band for the first time.  So now we are getting together weekly in the studio to practice for a couple of summer festivals.  We're learning more of her original songs and also a few covers. 

Here's a picture of Mark Lucier, kicking out a beat.  This guy is crazy.  I'll try to get more pictures and biographical information on these guys in the coming weeks.  Hope to see you all at bidgefest this year.

When we had an opportunity to pick up a Nikon D200 DSLR camera from our good friend Dave Huang, we just had to go for it (well... more accurately, i had to go for it and i had to convince jessie we could sell a half dozen things to pay for it).  Bye-bye to our nice Olympus digital, that takes nice pictures - about 5 seconds after you needed it to.  We don't really play with our PSP anyway... we never should have bought one in the first place.  And Jessie's formerly favorite toy, a Microsoft Zune, collects dust since she received a apple iPhone for Christmas. Sell, sell and sell (when we get around to it).

This is one of my co-workers, Brian Hess, we both work day jobs at Calumet Electronics in Calumet, MI.  Being that i was so excited about the new camera, i just could help but take it to lunch to document my co-workers trying to get a moment of piece in the middle of their work day.

Sure, I bill myself as a videographer, but there are always times when any design/media business needs to snap off a few good pictures.  Of course for the heavy-duty professional gun-n-run work we totally call in the local heavy weight, Adam Johnson, with his bad-boy Nikon D3.  But for everyday shots of our dogs, my feet, or whatever jessie has on her mind, having a nice dslr like the Nikon D200 just helps you sleep a little better at night (makes the pillow a little lumpy).  Just ask Ray bolsey... he is never more than a short sprint away from his new D300.

What can i say about green screen work?

I can tell you that we've messed around with it in the past with mixed results.  The concept behind green screen work is straight forward enough... shoot somebody in front of a green screen, have the computer make the green transparent, insert an interesting background and wala!  Your subject is magically transformed to a new location.

Now if you actually attempt this simple 1-2-3 procedure, you'll find there is a little more to it; the devil is truly in the details.  I've learned that lighting the green screen properly is very important.  The fewer shades of green captured by the video camera, the easier time you will have making the green become transparent.  So you have to watch out for wrinkles, shadows and uneven lighting.  I've learned to light the green screen independently of the subject and place the subject far enough away from the green screen to avoid shadows.  stretch the screen if possible and iron or steam it smooth.   I'm talking about a fabric screen of course.  Painted surfaces or paper may be much easier to work with.

I do most of my editing these days with Sony Vegas pro and let me tell you, its chroma key video effect is terrible.  Despite all of my careful preparation, A fairly even tone of green, a video camera good at capturing green (the canon xl2), Sony Vegas just isn't up to the challege.  So i was forced to search for another software package to key out the green.  Presently i'm trying out the package fxhome compositelab.  Where vegas falls flat, CompositeLab is almost like magic.  Unfortunately it takes me out of my comfortable editing environment and forces me to deal with a new interface and tools and basically just adds another step to my work flow.

I'm still working with a trail version of compositelab.  I need to decide if its worth the $150.00 based on the low volume of green screen work we do. 

You would never know that Jessie and I make a living, at least in part, developing web sites.  It seems the last web site we ever get to work on is our own.  It doesn't help that jessie and i both have radically different approaches and skills when it comes to web design.

Jessie loves exploring the internet for new gizmos and gadgets and sometimes i feel like i'm being invited to join a new this or that every other week.  I'm a self-taught programmer of almost 20 years and i just as soon write everything myself from scratch - even if i don't ever finish anything.  I guess either way you look at it, Jessie's gizmos and my piles of code usually end up sharing the same graveyard as we move onto the next exciting thing.

Jessie has already proposed a gizmo for our official brassard media blog where I, once again, just want to write my own.  Well... this time I win, because while jess is out enjoying drinks with friends... I'm secretly building up this blog.  Let's just not tell her i've started this blog until its too late!  shhhhh.