Recapping 2018 is no easy task for me, mainly because remembering most of it is difficult… I don’t mean that in any sort of inebriated way, but in a way where when you have a child so everything’s a blur because life changes!

2018 we had our first child! Early 2018 we spent pregnant then come May, boom, we’re officially parents. Our daughter not only brought us joy but brought time commitment changes. I SO desired to spend all my brain power on our daughter, and I think so far I’ve done well. But as many of you know, if we want to have any sort of income you have to work somehow. So, projects still came in! Not only through my day job, but with side projects.

I wanted to take a few moments to share some of the Top 5 projects I tackled in 2018. Most are videos, as usual, but that’s ok!

5. A Year-In-Review: At the start of 2018 I was tasked with creating a Year-In-Review video for my church, recapping 2017.

The challenge was obviously covering the whole year while keeping it engaging and delivering information.

I kept the video simple with images vs. video from the year, as a means to not create too much movement in the video with the text and imagery that was overlaid. Static images helped the viewer read the text better than moving video.

It was a lot of content to blend in, but fun to look back.

4. Capturing A Big Day: Wedding videos have always been a fun and challenging task.

The Schmidt wedding was the only wedding I took on in 2018, mainly due to the life changing event my wife and I were embarking on in May.

Their wedding took place at two beautiful locations that I had the pleasure of capturing for the first time.

The highlight for me was that my wife got to come as a second shooter! She was roughly 5 months pregnant (finally past the morning sickness phase) and eager to help me out and experience a fun wedding.

3. DRIVEN: I work for Phi Kappa Theta National Fraternity during the day (and sometimes into the night!) and leading up to the birth of our child created some challenges for me.

I wanted to be 100% present for our daughter’s birth, so getting projects done was key. One of the final projects I worked on before our daughter was born was a DRIVEN video.

I filmed the footage for this video in early spring down in New Orleans. The template for this series was created by my co-worker, laying the foundation of its style (credits, lower 3rd’s, B-roll) so my job was to add to the series with this installment featuring one of our recognized members, Mike Callais. The video was then shown at our 2018 event in Orlando, FL before Mike was honored at the event.

My goal was to get the video in a good, edited place before the end of May, actually before our daughters due date, which was May 16th. The due date actually pushed to May 24th, so the extra time was much appreciated!

2. MORE: Something I help with every year is our church’s youth camp, Ignite Camp.

This year’s camp was once again in Mears, MI. The theme was MORE, and leading up to camp I still had time to produce my usual flow of materials for camp: videos, logo, promo materials and so on.

The added difficulty this year? You guessed it, preparing for the birth of our little girl.

I managed to get everything done beforehand, with only editing the Rules video between her birth and camp.

Now, my wife is also involved with our youth group as a High School youth leader, so she has a group of girls she works with. The question was, will both of us be going to camp with a 2 week old?? Turns out we did!

For me it was a pretty straight forward camp, but having an infant is quite a challenge, one my wife took the brunt of and handled fantastically. I doubt we’ll ever want to take an infant again, but it was something to say we accomplished!

Honorable Mention: “Under the Bigtop” Our annual Halloween party is always a huge project. Our challenge this year as you can imagine was putting on a party while taking care of our little girl.

We accomplished this by having the party at a different location while we utilized a babysitter!

The party turned out to be a bigger production than I thought it would be. I created several props to boost the “Circus” theme, including a ticket booth, some face cutout panels, a Midway sign and a Freak Show sign.

1. Welcome to Parenthood: As mentioned several times, in May 2018 we became parents!

Something I had wanted to do for a long time was take video (and photos) of our little girl regularly. In today’s time it’s easy to take photos and video, but I also wanted to take higher quality video and photos.

So with the use of our NIKON D7500 I was able to capture every moment of the start of our little girl’s life.

At the delivery I setup the NIKON, as well as a couple of strategically placed GoPro’s to capture the big event. My goal was to do recaps of our daughter on a regular basis. The first one I did was at 2 weeks old. Subsequently I’ll do a recap at the end of every season during her first year of life. From there I might do the occasional video of an event, but probably also at every birthday. I doubt I’ll post the recaps on public social media as a means to keep her as protected as possible. The image above is a screenshot from her 2 week video. Something we’re going to cherish forever.

2018 was quite the year, a blurry one but also one of the most memorable ones!

- The Media Buff

"The Year In Creativity Blog" 2018 Edition