Time for another edition of "stuff Mike does for work!" My boss is still constructing our new website, which includes this new screening room featuring several of our more successful projects - all of which, coincidentally, were made by me:

http://alkayemedia.com/dev/screening.php?url=fenwick&tf=true

I did the editing on all of the videos there. The two informational videos for Fenwick HS and Berwyn's National Night Out were also shot by me, which makes them the best ones. The site is still under construction though, which is why everything looks so crappy.

And here's some commercials I shot & directed, but didn't edit (we get the jobs through a company in New York, which hires us to go and shoot for them). I did like a zillion of these last year, but here's a few of the better-looking ones:

Scharm Floor Covering
Wazio Orthodontics
Creative Printing Services
Anderson Lock

I'm bored.

-Mike

Ah yes...boredom can make us all do......things.....

The Fenwick video (The only one I could find on there) looked VERY well edited. Did you use the trusty ol' Vegas, or did they make you succumb to the evil that is AVID/Final Cut?

The commercials you directed looked very "normal"....which isn't a bad thing, it just doesn't seem like something the "Greatest Person....In the world" would enjoy....I thought a Shemue song would pop in at any minute.

P.S.

Is it bad that I kept expecting Terry to just pop into the "Scharm Floor Covering" one?

I do get to use Vegas at work, it's great. Take that, school!

And yes, the commercials themselves are incredibly boring. The scripts are so cookie cutter that I don't even need to bother bringing them with anymore cause I know exactly the shots I've gotta get. And I almost got Terry to come with me to one of the commercials to sneak in as an extra, but he overslept.

Closest I've gotten to Mike music in a work project was using a Crush 40 song (Dangerous Grounds) for the opening montage of a high school pep rally we shot. My boss was like, "...yeah, it's fine."

-Mike

You can use Vegas at work? That's great!
I'm so sick of AVID....the simplest thing in Vegas become the most challenging in AVID....like raising audio. Did they make you guys use AVID or Final Cut at UIC?

In regards to using Crush 40...would you get sued for using their music in a commercial without their permission?

All in all....I can't wait until you guys get your whole crew together and manage to score your own show or something. I could easily see you guys on Adult Swim or Comedy Central.

For commercials, we have a library of royalty-free generic music to use. For personal videos, like weddings or school functions, we can use whatever we want cause nobody cares.

Final Cut was the law of the land at UIC. I did about 2 projects on it before I decided to screw the system and just do all my projects at home on Vegas. If they had bothered to teach us about things like compression and color correction instead of just why Final Cut was the best, it woulda helped me out a lot more.

And we would be on Adult Swim, but we're too busy doing videos about our apartments right now to think of good ideas.

-Mike

Ohhh Catholic school girl uniforms.... I kept thinking "Fezzik" every time they said Fenwick and thus... Andre the Giant... you get it.

Man, I need a job.

Fenwick is a village that isn't that far from me...
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=d&saddr ... 9&t=h&z=13

You'll also see I'm not far from "Moscow"...

Underage girls in short skirts and knee-high socks...that was a good day. And getting to sit through girls volleyball AND swim practice...that's why I like my job.

-Mike

Very interesting stuff.

Your school isn't the only place that shouts that Final Cut Pro is the best...but now I see the true light of Vegas and FCP just fails in comparison to it. That and I don't use a Mac.

Since this got bumped back up, check out the demo I did for the front page of our new site: http://www.alkayemedia.com/home.html Guess who snuck himself into another video, lol.

-Mike

Damn, I got to say that you're having a nice career...I'm not even sure if I'll get a job, let along an internship when I'm out of school.

Is that you from the UIC Safety video? Or that's just how you look when you go to work?

One of the bigger jobs my studio does every year is the Midwest Color Guard Championships. This year, I made a couple trailers to promote the DVD, which you can see at: http://www.midwestcolorguard.com/videos.cfm. The first 2 videos are mine, while the 3rd was made as practice for one of our newer editors. These trailers were also played on a big screen between units at this year's championship competition. You don't know how thrilling it was for me to hear Crush 40 come blaring over the gymnasium speakers to a crowd of unsuspecting Indiana folk.

-Mike

Damn, you're fulfulling one of my fav. High School dreams. I've always wanted to play Sonic music in the gaint speakers, or Hulk Hogan's theme song and start runnin' wild on some of the idoits there.

My latest commercial is up. I got to work with the Willowbrook Police Dept. on a commercial for their new red light cameras (which I'm personally against, but work is work). I directed, shot, and edited this one myself. It was fun working with the police again, especially to get that overhead shot of the car running the light. They blocked off a crazy busy intersection and put me up in the bucket of a fire truck to get that shot. Check it out:

http://www.alkayemedia.com/screeningroom/screeningroom_informational.html