Rip Van Stewart aka Welcome to my blog.

I created this blog over 3 years ago. Like many things in my life it sat here in cyberspace, neglected and unused. So, forgive me as I dust it off and change the oil, and maybe get this thing up and running.

At one point in my life I did an amazing amount of writing in my life, partially because it was required for school and partially because I enjoyed it. Some of my work was fairly scholarly, but the majority of it was just random bits and snippets out of my brain. The hardest part about writing is usually finding a starting point. We've got to find a starting point somewhere so I guess we'll start with what's going on in my life at the moment.

I'm finding a real push to be creative in various outlets right now. I'm currently on the broadcast team at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Oklahoma City.

We've just gotten a JVC GY-HD100U High-Def capable camera and I'm really enjoying getting to know the camera. If we had access to one of these when I was an RTVF major in school (21 hours of college credit that is actually coming in handy these days) I think I'd be living in Hollywood making movies. This thing is amazing. It shoots natively at 780p 60fps and converts to 1080i or down to SD or even 24p for that film look. This is a professional camera with a price point for under $6,000. Simply unreal.

The church has also invested in a really nice dedicated graphics pc along with Adobe's Production Studio software which includes Premier Pro 2.0. PP2 is a computer based non-linear editor (NLE). Again when I learned basic editing we were cutting film and splicing it together with glue and tape. Computer editing cuts the time down by leaps and bound and gives even the beginning editor incredible power. The flexibility and price of this software is such that it's getting out of the realm of professional editors and into the hands of serious amateurs.

Basically for under $10,000 we have everything we need to shoot, edit and produce professional level commercials, broadcast, or dvd's. As soon as they get the HD-DVD formats figured out then we will have everything we need to produce our entire workflow in HD as well.

Anyway, as soon as I get my first real project produced I'll make sure and post a link to it, but in the meantime here is some stock footage of my dogs I shot with the new camera.

I've got a few ideas for some funny shorts including: Iron Chef: Jack vs. Amy (this is funny when you realize my wife has no acutal cooking ability whatsoever) and Heaven outsources its call center (to speak with St. Peter press 3)

I'd also like to do a video for one of my favorite new artists Jonathan Colton.

If you have any other ideas for a short video project let me know. I'll take all submissions under consideration.