Pilothouse Films Blog

I just finished a 1-minute video promoting a site called gospelforth.com. They raise money to fund missionaries, Bibles, radio broadcasts, and more. If you go to www.gospelforth.com, you can click on a button that will take you to a page of advertisements. Each time a person clicks on the button, the advertisers contribute money to the cause. You can click up to once per day and the site even lets you sign up for an auto-reminder e-mail.

Creating videos like this is the reason Pilothouse Films exists and it was a fulfilling project personally. The video took a little over a week to put together, but that involved staying up past my bedtime almost every night of the week. The music is from an artist named Josh Woodward who graciously allows his music to be used in all kinds of ways completely free of charge. Thank you Mr. Woodward!

Here is an experiment in making things look small:

Thanks to some helpful info from this tutorial site!

Just wrapped up a project with Common Ground International. I put together a promotional video for their high school immersion trips. CGI takes high school students to Costa Rica to experience the language and culture, serve the local community, and have a great time. I really like what they do because it isn’t just about taking students on a fun trip – it’s also about helping others. You can watch the promo video on their website, or on the Pilothouse Films Facebook page.

With the promo video off the plate, I’m editing a wedding filmed a couple of weeks ago in La Conner. We got some really nice looking footage that day (even with storm clouds and rain threatening) and I hope to have a highlight video up soon.

The DVD is basically finished. There isn’t much more I can do until I get some footage of the campers and coaches in action next week. The only bit I still need to do is get music tracks onto each menu. Here are some pictures of the menus I designed:

There is a transition animation that zooms in to each sub-menu. Sub-menus also zoom back out to the main menu.

This menu will contain the highlight video for the week and also a 2-3 minute slide show of still photos for each of the teams that the campers are assigned to.

This menu will lead to short interviews with each coach.

This menu will lead to the talks given during the week and also to the skits performed.

In gearing up for next week’s camp I’ll need to schedule what the photographers are doing each day, what my intern and I will be shooting, and then charting out a work flow for getting slide shows and video into the DVD project. All video needs to be finished by Friday so we can burn DVDs for all the campers on Saturday morning. There won’t be time for any setbacks so hopefully everything works as intended.

In addition, I’ve got a rehearsal dinner Saturday night and a wedding to film on Sunday. This will be an insane week!

So now begins the awkward stage of starting this kind of business. I’ve got a fully-functional web site, demo reel, sample video products, etc. But no customers. I’m filling the time with projects that have been on the back burner for a while.

I need to have a functional DVD menu ready to go for the AIS soccer camp in mid-July. It’s animated and ready to be built, but I wanted to try to add a few features to it (sub-menus with transition animations). I need that DVD project to be completely built so that when it comes time to film the camp, all I will need to do is drop the edited footage into the DVD project and burn it.

I will also need a “splash” animation to go on the front end of that DVD, with the PF logo involved somehow. I’ve got a working sample of what I want, but I might try to redo it in 3D with Blender.

Also on the back burner (way back) is the 4th installment of Gabe the Ace. It is a fun video I make each summer with my nephews and neice while we are on vacation at the family reunion in August. Usually I film and edit the video during the vacation. Last year I decided to just film it and then wait until I got back home to edit it…and it still isn’t finished. So I’ll try and wrap that up over the next week.

Enough blabber…