Category: David White

Traveling back through the weeks that were

Traveling through the last few weeks with thoughts mostly of Ann and her upcoming birthday; which occurred on August 17th. It all began with a trip up the coast to Sheboygan, WI to introduce Jim Proue and David White. I’d thought it would be fun to have them sing and play at Ann’s little surprise family birthday celebration. They’d never played together yet hit the mark right from the get-go.
(click image for larger view – Slide show with more images from this get together)

(click images for larger view)

The night before the party we went to hear Tracy Chapman at the Pabst Theartre. Without doubt – the most incredible concert I’ve ever attended. Ms. Chapman (and her band) performed flawlessly; and actually “better than” the original studio recordings. (click image for larger view – Slide Show of a few “intermission” images)

Of course it took a few phone calls to invite the family; a bit tidying up, arranging for food and errands with Erin’s help;  and then – the party sort of just happened. (click image for larger view – Slide show of additional party images)

The day after the party Ann did her annual Irish Fest. Below we see one of Ann’s customers — not showing off his hair cut — but rather performing a fine Irish kick. (click image for larger view – Slide show of additional Irish Fest images)

Then it was getting ready for a four day road trip to the beautiful Mississippi River hills and valleys in Northwestern Illinois, Eastern Iowa and Southwestern Wisconsin. (click image for larger view – Slide show of additional river trip images)

Panning for gold in the stream: twitter 4 months later

(click image for larger view)

My friend, David White, introduced me to twitter. As a web designer and marketing consultant I felt a need to know; to keep up with trends. I began following people that David followed; and posted my first brief message on November 22nd, 2008. It took a lot of time to read what seemed banal and/or narcissistic 140 character messages from people I didn’t really know. Occasionally someone would post a link to a web site or blog which actually had value to me or my business. Mostly I read messages about the value of twittering and social media as marketing and PR tools. It seemed strange; sort of like people calling each other on their phones and constantly talking about how the telephone is a great tool for marketing and PR; or handing out flyers which state over and over again that flyers are great marketing and PR tools. Obviously I wasn’t following the right people. Another crazy thing: we’re only seeing one side of conversations. You have to follow the people that those you follow talk to in order to receive the whole conversation; such as it is. This all feels quite tedious. And for what? An occasional useful link or bit of knowledge.

Then there’s my little messages going out there with links to my work or blog posts. Most times I get no response. I have no idea if anyone found it useful or interesting. Feels quite weird. However, lately I’ve found myself finding and following filmmakers, designers, artists and musicians; as well as buddhists and zen practitioners. And things have become more interesting; at least for my sensibility. All of a sudden I began to receive some positive feedback and participate in conversations which I can actually relate to.

Last week I created a new web page-site poetographs.com to post work which puts words into a graphic context that, hopefully, enhances meaning. I put the link out on twitter and received a number of retweets (RT). Bing Futch, a beautiful and generous musician, responded and RT’d the link. I had some poetographs from back in 2004 which I wanted to resurrect as a series. I put them into a movie form and sent the link to Bing. Within 24 hours Bing returned a link with sound added to the movie. Now that’s gold my friends. Perhaps a small nugget. But solid gold nonetheless. Here’s our collaboration. Thank you Bing. Strange as it seems; thank you twitter; I get it.

What if a client doesn’t have a video production budget?

The current trend toward feeding multimedia information over the internet demands our readiness to deliver professional messages for our clients. We’ve ramped up our video production and post production capabilities; while maintaining a budget conscious niche. Even with our cost conscious approach to video production some clients cannot budget those costs; yet understand the power of audio and visuals to more powerfully deliver their message on the web. For these clients we encourage them to consider fine still photography in combination with professionally captured audio, to deliver a more powerful multimedia message than either still images or audio, alone, can offer.

Our first opportunity to provide an example of putting professional quality still images with professional quality audio came from attending a JoeNetworks “networking coffee and donuts” event at JRA — and here, brought to you by MediumRareProductions, is the result:

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