About a month or so ago I received a bubbly email from my friend Jon Casey! He is a artist who lives out in San Francisco and his Mom was my 4th grade teacher. Side note: that was the only grade I got straight A’s in. HA! Anyway…he  makes his living as a illustrator and is one of the best! He had received an invitation form Corel to create a 5-8 minute short documentary about his life as an artist and how he uses the Corel Painter Program. Now usually, when anyone asks me to piece together and edit a video  it’s a wedding, music video, web content or acting demo reel. So, I was ready for the challenge!

I was pretty stoked and happy because I thought I would be flying to San Francisco to film Jon. Sadly, the budget wasn’t enough to fly me there . No matter, I still wanted in on the project. I got to work! Scripting the outline for the shots and crafting the interview questions. I have to admit it might have seemed crazy to Jon when he got a 6 page .PDF on how I wanted the interview to look , how to ask the questions and then the type of  B-roll I wanted. But HEY! I had a vision of how it would look and since I couldn’t be there myself, I wanted as much footage as I could get. I even filmed myself on my iphone walking Jon threw the shots and how I wanted them to look. Yeah ,maybe I am a little nutty.

Thank goodness Jon had some awesome friends with all sorts of talents! He recruited Matthew Scott and Tony Gonzalez to shoot the interview and studio B-roll. Matthew and I spoke on the phone and he put me at ease when we talked about the video. It’s nerve wracking when you can’t film something yourself! After checking out Matthew’s site, I was blown away by his amazing photography. Tony even gave me some pointers on how to deal with the sound and I was pleased with the quality of the footage that was sent to me.

Jon also had some gal pals shoot the SF city footage that I needed. Kimberly Bainum and Marcella Gries did a wonderful job recreating the shots that I had sent Jon via iPhone, plus more!  Got to love girls that know how to shoot! Thanks gals!

Props have to go out to  Nathaniel, the designer from Canada! His emails back and forth to me were filled with sayings like Ahoy! Cheers!, along with talk about internet robots! This made my long days and  nights of editing cheerful.  We had a Skype video chat and this guy knows his stuff! So hats off to Nathaniel,  for working with me and creating a brilliant way of handling the typography for the credits and title. I hope to work with him again soon!

Last, I would like to thank Jon for coming to me with this project. I know you put in a lot of late nights and own pocket money on this video. I think we both can agree that it was totally worth it! I am very proud of the final product and can”t wait to see how “the video will live in the wild!” (a quote from Nathaniel). Thank you Jon and I can’t wait for the next project !

Without further Internet space being wasted, HERE IT IS!  Please pass this on to your friends, enemies, whoever you think might give it a few minutes of their day. It’s enjoyable to see how Jon the artist, illustrator ,caricaturist  and cool human being works and lives !