thechrisproject photography

One idea the director of the Film Festival had was to do a time lapse of the Orpheum filling up. I did a rough draft of the video and uploaded it to Flickr, which just recently introduced videos. There has been a lot of anti-video sentiment amongst current Flickr users. If it’s there, I might as well use it. The groups I had planned on adding it to are not currently accepting videos.

Last weekend I had a fun filled Saturday. At 3pm I took a walk with Hanson. More photos and the story at dane101.

Saturday night was a derby night. The big news was that the fire marshal decided a few days before the bout that the capacity of the venue was going to be 40% lower than previously thought. A lot of people didn’t get in. More photos, again, at dane101.

This year I got the honor of being the Wisconsin Film Festival’s official documentarian.  It was a great opportunity, a lot of fun, and a lot of work.  Hauling a tripod and a few bags of gear up and down State Street a half dozen times a day gets a little grueling.  It was challenging to me to shoot the same type of thing over and over again and make it interesting each time.  I got some shots that I’m really proud of, and a lot of shots that I think are a good record of what went on and what the energy of the event was like.  I have close to 3000 to sort through.  Editing is a big job here.

One shot that I was asked to try was a time lapse of the gorgeous Orphuem Theater filling up.  We picked a movie that had sold a ton of tickets.  I set up my camera with a very wide lens at the front of the house hooked up to a laptop running the Canon EOS Utility software, which will take a picture every X seconds for you.  I took a picture every 5 seconds while the theater went from about 4 people to nearly 1300.  They were still letting people in when I took it down so the show could get started.

In the next week or two I’ll be editing the photos, delivering them to the festival organizers, and posting a few on Flickr and here.  Here are two that I put up on dane101.com last week.  The first is the Orphuem and the second is the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s lecture hall, where movies were playing during the festival.