In the past 9 months I have been working really hard on making a lot of little changes, both personally and professionally.  The changes in my personal life include the battle on quitting smoking after well over a decade of cigarettes, drastic changes in my diet and eating habits, and learning to “enjoy” some seriously hard exercise. On the professional side,I re-skinned the entire site design for my work, changed the format and exposure of the blog, created a Tumblr account as a visual journal/diary of sorts, and have been way more active in the world of social media.

I have started to flesh out some more personal work to add a little bit more of a diverse look and feel to my portfolio….and to challenge myself visually and creatively. The first of these projects has been on the site for about two months now.  Not knowing how I wanted to display this project, since it is part one of four, I have placed it for now in the Personal Work section of the site.  I call the project “That Run Almost Killed Me”.  Thanks to my girlfriend, Jennifer, I have started to actually do real world exercise and workouts.  She actually inspired this project because of her lifestyle….running, workouts, gym visits, etc. Of course this project has some twists, both visual and conceptually.

When I first came up with the idea, I knew that I was going to release the images and the accompanying videos in a sequence.  I felt it was a necessary thing to do to keep the story interesting enough to encourage people to come back and see where the story went next.

This whole project couldn’t have been done with out the help of some amazing people.  My grilfriend, Jennifer, for putting up with me barking at her when she ran through the sequence differently than i wanted or running the same scene over and over again to the point it actually became her workout for the day.  Brandon Dougherty of Rottenworld Makeup for his amazing effects work.  Steve DeMent helped set up lighting and did some second shooting of still while I was directing the video sequences.  Brad Leese functioned as grip on the shoot as well as helping to promote and push this project to the different social media outlets.  Brad also runs Austin Media Slingers which provides social media management, consulting, SEO and much more.  My close friend, Stephen Hooker, was my 1st Assistant Camera.  Without his knowledge and help, this video would never have happened.

You can view the rest of the stills in the Personal Work portfolio on the site.