Hawaii - My stomping grounds

Oahu Hawaii is one of my favorite places on earth! I lived there for a year in 2010-2011 working on a documentary on an amazing surf photographer, Jon Mozo. While working on that project I had a lot of free time to do projects that seemed fun to me, and that's when I would film with all the local college kids, and some of our biggest videos, especially for that time happened then. Here's a few of them:

World's Largest Slip And Slide


Waimea Cliff Jump


Kauai - The Lost World




Those are a few examples of what I was shooting in 2010, with a Canon 5D Mark II, and my trusty glidecam. Hawaii became my favorite place to shoot, not for the obvious reasons of beautiful scenery, but because it was the place I discovered my own voice. How to become independent, confidence in myself, and how to lead others and make things happen. Before 2010/Hawaii days, I knew little about that, but I had yet to discover my voice until then.

Fast forward 7 years later, I just released another video I filmed in Hawaii. This one was another important one for me for the fact that I had come back to Hawaii to premiere the film I had spent 7 years working on (off and on). It had gotten accepted as one of the main films for the Hawaii International Film Festival.

While I was here for the film festival, I decided I would add some extra days to the trip, since it would be 5 days premiering the film, I would focus on filming Hawaii again, the place I had discovered my voice. This time was also different for the fact that I was now married, so I got to bring my wife on the trip as well. We were on the island for 8 days total, including traveling, so we didn't have a ton of time to show off an entire island. Megan and I went right to work, never missing a sunrise or sunset, no matter how late we worked the night before.

As far as equipment goes, we were filming on the Red Weapon 6K camera and the Phantom 4. Right when we got there the Red camera was having issues and the camera couldn't hold a battery charge. So I had to focus on the Phantom 4 for most of our shots. I was forced to learn the drone/camera. Every night I would come back and watch YouTube videos on how to get the footage looking better, and learning how to fly it better. It was trial and error learning at it's best :)  We met a lot of amazing people on the shoot, and I got to have my wife with me for the whole adventure, doesn't get better than that.

As I began editing the video, I wanted to explore something I had never done before, or at least not very many times, having a voice over/narration through the video. I love watching TED talks, so I thought it would be powerful to have an inspiring voice over while showing footage that would be inspiring as well, so that is where the voice over came from. We have a lot of people contacting us, saying we can use their music, and one of those people had sent us a library of motivational speeches, and that's what you will hear in the video. But the thought process behind it was to try something new outside our typical "nature" style videos, and see if it could bring in a new audience as well.

You can see below the video we created, with the behind the scenes right below that (and just for the record, there's 3 behind the scene videos:

Main Video:



Behind The Scenes: