Short film featuring Badgers, a Green Woodpecker, a Nuthatch, a Robin and my Parents!

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 01:43PM
Tags: wildlife, video, sony, ex3
Filed in: Website design, Webfilm and video production
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Over the weekend before last, I shot a short film in the magnificent garden at my parent‚Äôs new house using our new Sony EX3. They have a very active badger sett and the garden is teaming with wildlife. The badgers came right up to the house in the evening and, oblivious to the automatic flood light, I could film them from just a few feet away.

I had great fun practising with our new camera, a Sony EX3, which I used on our 17' crane as well as with the excellent Adaptimax adaptor and a Nikon 70-300mm lens for getting up close to the birds. When used with the Adaptimax, the lens will have a crop factor of 5.4 so it's like using a 1620mm lens which is quite amazing. Looking forward to getting a 50-500mm Sigma eventually though.

The amount of wildlife my parents have in their garden is amazing. I managed to get some reasonable shots of a Green woodpecker, a juvenile Nuthatch and a Robin which are in the film.

Recently completed promotional video for local function band

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 12:02PM
Filed in: Website design, Webfilm and video production
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Local events and functions band, 'Limited Company Band', recently commissioned us to shoot a 10 minute promotional film. The format for the film is based around short sections of different songs so as to give a good indication of the band's whole line-up.

Using only a single camera for the shoot, I shot each song from several different angles and shot types including a sweeping crane shot and a slow push/pull on our track and dolly for the wide angle shots. All this footage meant I could edit together an exciting sequence and all without having to worry about including any other cameras on stage!

Limited Company Band are very pleased with the results and I enjoyed working with them.

Here's a kind testimonial from them:

We used Phototropic to shoot and edit our promotional DVD. We are delighted with the results and hugely impressed not just with the professionalism and attention to detail shown but also with the creative direction and ideas Ben gave us throughout the process. We would thoroughly recommend using Phototropic and would definitely use Ben again.

New SetSeed powered website design: Shillingford Organics

Wednesday, August 6, 2008 at 04:18PM
Tags: cms, setseed, design, portfolio
Filed in: Website design portfolio
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Shillingford Organics needed to replace their old website because it was hard to control and didn't visually reflect their business. We came up with a new content-driven design which reflected their organic nature and made it easy to access information on their products.

Due to the fact their old site was very hard to make changes to it's content had not been kept up to date. Now that their new site is powered by SetSeed they can easily update their weekly veg box contents as well as adding images to galleries and making other regular changes. Shillingford Organics also send out monthly newsletters using SetSeed's built in email newsletter system. This lets visitors automatically add themselves to a mailing list right on the website.

SetSeed features used by Shillingford Organics

Task based interface

Contact Forms

Blog

Galleries, images and video

Version Control

RSS Feeds

Email Newsletter

Livechat

This is what Bridget Rendal from Shillingford Organics said about us:

Ben Vallack is a Genius!! Ben spent a relatively short amount of time redesigning the Shillingford Organics website and now it looks amazing. I especially like the consistent format throughout, which gives it a very professional look. It is very easy to modify the site with lots of lovely tips and has much more flexibility than our previous site. The thing I love about it is that you don't have to be a trained website administrator to make changes as it is extremely user-friendly. Many thanks Ben.