Lisa and Luke in Chicago

Brenton and I had our request from Lisa and Luke.  They wanted the water and the Chicago skyline to be in their engagement pictures, and boy did we find the perfect spot to meet their request.  After navigating around the Shamrock Shuffle 8k race we made our way to the water.  For March, we actually had a warm sunny day for the shoot and not a cloud in the sky.  Mind you, being by the water there was still a breezy chill to the air, but the warm sun on your face more than made up for it coming out of this winter.

Lisa and Luke were great.  They turned up all smiles and ready for a great time.  The location was so beautiful Brenton and I couldn’t resist shooting some video.  So we did a time-lapse of the skyline with the water along with a few other video snippets of the lovely couple.  I got home and was elated with how well the time-lapse turned out (it is the intro part in the video below) but we really didn’t have a ton of video footage for a full blow video---but sometimes I like to make a video as a surprise even if we weren’t hired specifically for video. 

I have been learning more about a program called Adobe After Effects (how to animate text and stabilize video footage and such---which is only scratching the surface of what this program can do) and had this idea to morph video into a painting.  For those of you who don’t know, I do a good deal of paintings and custom artwork as well as the photography and videography.  The idea with morphing a video clip into a painting was to bring everything we do together--- sort of the culmination of Peer Canvas as a whole.  But, I also wanted the painting to look as though some of it were being painted before your eyes.  So I looked into animating the sketch outlines of the painting process.  The whole process from conception to learning if and how it could be done was both a challenge and a delight.    It is funny how when you are working on something that you love doing, it brings out the love of learning how to do more and better with it. 

I showed the video to a few people who I rely on for feedback.  (yes, my mom is a member of this group J ) Mind you, I had been working on this video for several days straight, all hours of the day, one part of the clip that is like 2 seconds I spent a whole day on and was then contemplating tossing it out altogether.  I was to the point that I was wondering if I was crazy---is this clip good at all-----or might this be my best work??  Thankfully my feedback crew thought it was the coolest.  Maybe it will become my “signature look” – who knows.  It is certainly something different, and I loved learning how to do it and look forward to seeing what else I can do with having a few more tricks up my sleeve.

So without further adieu…. I give you “Lisa and Luke in Chicago”

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