Video profile

Yo!

I just finished (as in, directed, cut, and scored) a series of video profiles of teachers and students of Køge Handelsskole (college) in Denmark for use on their new website. It's one of the projects I enjoyed the most, because of the interaction between me and my subjects.

I approached this in a very rough way, inspired by Hillman Curtis' digital video work (go here for his website) and Wim Wenders' work in "Buena Vista Social Club" (, in that I steered away from a talking heads-only kind of mini documentary. What I was most interested in was the individual person's personality and that, to my experience, does not come out of asking formal questions to someone. It comes out of taking them out for a drink and talking to them until your throat bleeds and your vocal cords rip. Alas, I did not have the time to ruin my talking capacity, so I resorted instead to asking some basic questions, then asking something completely unrelated to the interview, but something I knew they were passionate about. I took the camera somewhere at the back of the room and let it roll while me and my subjects talked, argued, joked around, etc. I even let them direct a segment of the interview (hint, it's the part with the posters).

I can't post everything here, it's in excess of 20min, but I'm posting my favourite one. Thomas Christensen's video profile. Thomas is many things, a graphic artist, digital video producer and director, film buff and a great photographer amongst others. He's teaching visualization at Køge. Please ignore the fact he's talking in Danish (unless you speak Danish yourself) and enjoy the imagery.

Lapse photography

I decided to try my hand at lapse photography. I used a consumer digital camera, which, with hindsight, was the reason I am not satisfied by the end result. Consumer cameras don't give the user enough control to do anything other than point and click. I suppose that's the point, but there is such a thing as a middle ground. Regardless, not being able to control the shutter speed made the video a bit staccato-like.