I produced, shot and edited this as part of an ongoing The Daily Beast series, My New York. It profiled prominent NYC residents in their favorite city spots, and aired on NYCTV25 as well as taxi cabs. My biggest challenge was trying to fit the piece into the 2:30 time limit, and I wish I had more time to let the edit breathe.

I filmed with a Canon 7D, a Canon 50 mm F1.8 and 24-105 mm F4.0L. I wasn’t allowed to shoot the actual performance other than the curtain call so some footage is handout broll. Everything with Chaunteé in it is mine. I did a little grading with Magic Bullet Looks, not much, as the theater lighting already helped my footage pop.

James Franco gave us a little Web video gold at the 2011 Newsweek Oscar Roundtable. One of six actors invited to the candid discussion, Franco sat down with Natalie Portman, Michelle Williams, Nicole Kidman, Annette Bening, and Colin Firth. The treasure? Revealing he had made a sex tape at age 19. When it comes to creating video traffic, you can’t get more golden than that.

I produced the two-hour discussion with my NEWSWEEK colleague, Sarah Frank, as well as a former Los Angeles Times video producer, John Vande Wege, and one freelance soundman.

During the midterm elections I put together a quirky little mashup of midterm election news. MSN linked directly to it–a coup on two fronts. First, MSN never linked to any video but their own (they have big ad commitments to serve). And, second, the behemoth usually only linked to their own politics pieces, not other sources.

The video ran up several hundred thousand views on the Newsweek site in only a few hours.

A Newsweek entertainment reporter wanted to do a celebrity interview series based on the premise “7 Things You Don’t Know About Me”. I took the idea and translated it into video, first in a makeshift studio I lit with Edison bulbs. And then afterward in our new Newsweek digs, where we updated the old bulbs with fluorescent fixtures. Here are two examples of that ongoing series. They aren’t the most famous of the people we filmed, but perhaps the most charming of my edits.

“I did stumble across a few interesting segments that I wouldn’t have found on my own. I like the quick-hit quirk of Newsweek’s campaign-trail dispatches, especially when contrasted with Time’s fluff about Deepak Chopra and ‘Favorite Movie Kisses.’”

He chided other magazines for their lack of expertise and polish and warned that they were tarnishing already beleaguered brands.

The series he’s referring to was our “On the Campaign Trail” videos, in which we followed the presidential contenders around the country for much of 2008. We showed little slices of campaign life, an insiders guide to the horse race, and did unedited interviews with the candidates. It was a very cool gig–a front row to history. I’m proud Newsweek could be AdAge’s one bright Web video spot.

http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/magazines-sites-add-video-expertise/125262/

I was honored to receive a News and Documentary Emmy nomination in 2007. It was Newsweek’s first–and the first of any U.S. magazine.

For the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, the Newsweek editors did a big cover story about the conflict as told through the letters and words of its heroic dead. I spent a day filming a family in Kentucky who had just lost their father to an IED the previous month. As you can imagine, the family’s emotions were raw, the grief palpable, the hurt and loss etched on the children’s faces. But the mom wanted to make sure their father’s story was told–I think so the father would always be remembered as a hero.

It was also the first project I traveled for while at Newsweek, and one of my first videos ever. I shot, produced and edited the video over a couple days, and composed my own music as well on Garage Band–back before the company paid for music rights. True one-man band production!