December 19, 2010
October 18, 2010
Gotta Taste for Adventure?
This is our entry for the Cheetah Power Surge TV commercial challenge.
Please vote with 5 stars at the Cheetah site. Thanks!
We shot this over 1 day using a Sony HVRA1U HDV camcorder, a great compact solution for Overland HD capture. And a GoPro HD on-board camera for those crazy POV shots. The weather wasn't perfect but we ended up shooting a wide range of Ontario locations, from Hockley Valley, to Osler Bluffs, to Oliphant Beach. Overall an exciting day!
Resolution: 1280 x 720
Video codec: H.264
Audio codec: AAC
Duration: 0:30
Resolution: 852 x 480
Video codec: H.264
Audio codec: AAC
Duration: 0:30
August 11, 2010
O.K. Pepe, lets lose em!
The Internet Movie Cars Database is an incredible community-driven resource that documents all sorts of vehicles used in movies. It can provide the exact make, model, and year of a particular movie vehicle. Users can also use the database to search by movie and type of vehicle, and can add their own comments or additional information.
Movieclips is a slick site started by a couple of movie fans with the goal of making all those classic scenes viewable, searchable, discussable, and yes ... legally sharable over your favorite social media sites. Users can search for clips with various criteria including dialog, can comment on the clips, and ultimately can link out to other sites to actually purchase the film.
So with these two reference sites I proudly introduce the 1982 Ford Bronco XLT making its incredible getaway river jump in Romancing the Stone.
I could see it was a Ford but I didn't know too much about offroad vehicles back then. But now with the help of the vehicle database, I know that it's a Bronco with the top removed in the back which opens up the rear bed, making it look like a pickup truck, when in fact it is not.
And the stunt was no slouch either!
April 19, 2010
Bruce & Grey Counties - Piping Plover Video
- Overlanding is about exploration, rather than conquering obstacles. While the roads and trails we travel might be rough or technically challenging, they are the means to an end, not the goal itself. The goal is to see and learn about our world, whether on a weekend trip 100 miles from home or a 10,000-mile expedition across another continent. The vehicle and equipment can be simple or extravagant - they, too, are simply means to an end. History, wildlife, culture, scenery, self-sufficiency - these are the rewards of overlanding.
One reward during my Bruce & Grey county exploration was being able to capture (on video) a nesting Piping Plover and chick on the beach near Oliphant, Ontario which is on the eastern Lake Huron shoreline.
I later learned that this was actually a very special reward because this specific Piping Plover family was the first nesting occurrence on that beach in over 30 years. The Piping Plover is endangered in the Great Lakes habitat so when the first nests since the mid '70s started appearing at Wasaga, Sauble, and then Oliphant, the Ministry of Natural Resources and local volunteers sprung into action to try to protect the nests as much as possible from predators and human encroachment.
I only wish I had a stronger zoom function on my Sony HDV camcorder as this was the closest I could get to their nest. Once I spotted them with the help of the volunteers that were monitoring the nest, I set up my tripod and started recording. The chick is barely visible for the first two thirds of the clip. It then pops out of the nest and scrambles across the sand.
You can learn more about the Piping Plover from the Wikipedia article, the Royal Ontario Museum's "Species at Risk" pages, and from the Nature Canada blog.
Resolution: 1280 x 720
Video codec: H.264
Audio codec: AAC
Duration: 1:43
Resolution: 852 x 480
Video codec: H.264
Audio codec: AAC
Duration: 1:43
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