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The Kingston Trio

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Film and Video

Camera work, editing, special effects, titles, social media and internet

After graduating The San Francisco Art Institute in 1983 I chose to work as a screen-printer. My mother had taught me the basics and I'd made some extra cash as a teenager printing rock idols on tee-shirts for friends. I had opportunities to join the film industry in Los Angeles but chose to make film making a secondary profession temporarily and create film as an independent. I worked for a company called Primal Screen in Berkeley, CA printing large bolts of fabric. I started my own company in 1986 printing original designs and selling them on Telegraph Ave. near the U.C. Berkeley campus. I continually dusted off my 8mm movie camera and captured events in my life. Soon I got a video camera and further documented my life. During that chapter in my life I married and soon had a child on the way. My wife chose to have a home birth for our first child so I videotaped the three long days of labor, the birth in all its graphic detail, the months prior and those that followed as our baby grew. It was a great lesson in setting up cameras with freshly charged batteries as all the demands of a father-to-be and home birth assistant came in to fruition. I was glad to have documented what turned out to be a somewhat tense situation since the labor took a good deal of time and the question of possibly throwing in the towel and going to the hospital for a Cesarian section. Our midwife, at one point, asked me if I thought we should go to the hospital. My answer was, "No, Margaret grew up in freezing New England Winters and played ice hockey. She's pretty tough, she's got this!" Thankfully I was right. Our daughter was born the old fashioned way in our small apartment as the six person birthing team shouted, "Push, push, push, you and do it!"

After our move to Santa Cruz in 1995 I met a contractor who was building a magnificent 4000 square foot home. I was hired to document the final stages of the structure that looked out upon the Santa Cruz mountains toward the Pacific Ocean. The project would serve as a way to display a sample of his building skills to potential clients. At that time I had enrolled at the local Cabrillo College and the digital age was upon us in a big way. I needed to get on board. I soon learned a lot about wed design, desktop publishing and working with video in the digital age. My move to Massachusetts in 2001 found me teaching music and designing web pages. Thankfully video projects continued and my dream of becoming a full time videographer was slowly coming true.

In 2009 a New Hampshire Hospital backed children's performer and family friend Brownie Macintosh bid for a flu prevention DVD project titled, Ah Choo, Stop the Flu. I came on board as cameraman/editor/director and soon volunteered to be a host and create both character and bouncing ball over lyrics animations. Soon I learned everything that has to do with bringing a DVD to completion. We hired the current day Kingston Trio, actors, sound engineers and camera operators. In 2009, after a very busy couple of years, we had it done. In 2010 TMW, A distributer of educational DVDs, picked it up and thousands of copies of the educational DVD are now being seen by young people all over the world. Since then PBS affiliates in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island have broadcast it after advising with me on preparing it for broadcast standards and thankfully all those things are possible using the current Adobe software. It was great experience because I successfully took on so many useful tasks. Have a look at the trailer below.

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