Latin Class of 2014

Latin School, as a part of celebrating their 125th year, commissioned a company to come out and take a photo of all of the kids and teachers, K-12, to line-up to spell out the 125. The photographer made use of a large Cherry-picker to get to the height needed to get the shoot. But then they realized that the process of getting some 1,200 people to crowd together in carefully designated positions, dictated by several math teachers capable of factoring in perspective, was an event worthy of documentation. Based on two previous, unsolicited, short videos of parent "Pot-Luck parties," coupled with the understanding that Lane knows how to make movies; the task fell to us to make the video.

The head of the committee emailed me an example of a college that had spelled-out their age, and was asked to "Make something like that." The heart of the video was time lapse footage condensing the event to three minutes. That seemed like a logical approach which led to several issues, the need to obtain a camera that was designed to shoot time-lapse, the need to guess how long the process would take in an attempt to select the best interval to compress the action; and finally, how with my pronounced fear of heights was I going to shoot from a 60 foot elevation. Lucky for me, Lane had the answer to all three questions; he used a GoPro camera to shoot time-lapse of a construction site while at an internship with a video production studio; he calculated the interval needed, and he was willing to go up in that cherry-picker. The only thing was, as a student, he needed to be IN the photo; so he had to set up the camera, confirm it was working correctly, then ride back to the ground to be a member of the class. So we decided that I would be down on the nice safe ground with the Canon 7D on a tripod,he would set the GoPro and help in shooting the kids arriving, and being arranged, including close-ups,till the moment he had to join the seniors in the photo.

The editing, took a while because of the need to cut 45 minutes of footage from the 7D down to under 3 minutes, That's cutting that involves both aesthetic choices as well as providing a fair distribution of ages and perhaps not cutting the wrong people. This is version of the 125 video Latin has on their website. They made Lane use their fight song instead the better music he had planned- Something about alumni and money. But I understand the difficult nature of being the head of the committee having to please so many people; so the plan was to give them what they wanted. They asked us to help, and after all that the school has done for Lane; we were looking at this as gift, and would cut it anyway they requested.

http://youtu.be/GXcWkngeHPM

Moments after, the plan was to shoot a photo of the senior class. Well, as long as we had the equipment set-up, it seemed natural for Lane and I to shoot a video for the class of 2014. I hope it will be fun for the class of 2014 to see now, and bring back memories years from now, in a way that a single still photo can't match.