Best Film & Video

08/21/2024

I had a great time creating this marketing piece for the East New Mexico University to promote their annual fundraiser, AIM HIGH.

Aim High is a sporting clay bird fundraiser event that benefits students of ENMU-Ruidoso Foundation with scholarships. This video is a marketing piece to att...

09/27/2021

The conclusion of the Champion Film Salon International Film Festival over the weekend yielded a status update I was not expecting with such great films screening. WHEELS: The Story of Kenn Madruga Racing received a Finalist Award. Truly an honor considering the 21 films screened, including 4 of which were feature length. Many thanks to the festival founders, Cary and Nicole Sandoval, for providing a public voice for people with special abilities.

09/23/2021

WHEELS: The Story of Kenn Madruga Racing was selected for viewing at the Champion Film Salon International Film Festival, taking place this Saturday in Frisco at the Hyatt Regency. https://www.cfsiff.com/schedule
The festival founder, Cary Sandoval, told me all the films are wonderful and everyone of them feature a story either directed by someone with a disability or someone in the film has a disability. What a worthwhile genre! Short films start the day with ours running in the second time slot at 8:30AM. Join us!

04/01/2021

Something fun I got to shoot and edit with my Panasonic EVA1 and Lumix S1H combo! Hat tip to Kyle Spradley.

This is "Sizzle3a.mp4" by Alan Lefebvre on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

03/09/2021

Me shooting a pretty cool Nike store in midtown Manhattan on a chilly morning this past week. Let be known, NYC has some pretty strict COVID rules I wasn’t aware of. You are required to test 3 days prior to coming and have a negative result. Otherwise they assume you have Covid and then they expect you to quarantine 10 days or test out by doing a three day test, show negative and then another test and show negative. They didn’t even offer the rapid test but that’s what I did because I was only there two days. Every day I would get a voice message and email telling me to quarantine or face a sizable fine. Glad to be home!

12/10/2020

What it looks like to convert AT&T stadium into a boxing arena in 5 days. Fox asked me to time lapse the conversion before the Spence Garcia fight last Saturday.

12/01/2020

I got to pre-light the portraits for Spence/Garcia boxing match for Fox sports.

09/29/2020

After a short waiting period for festival results, I'm happy to post my little documentary about an inspiring man, Kenn Madruga, who shows us all how to live a full an active life despite having MS. I got to follow Kenn around at the Alien City Dragway in Roswell, NM for a couple nights as he and his volunteer race team compete with all the other drag racers (many of them sponsored, and Kenn is not) in the Pro category earlier this spring. Kenn's 1964 Dodge Dart is a beast with it's modified large block engine that Kenn and his Mopar resources put together over several years of hard work. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, I wanted to do this short film on Kenn and share it with others. Many of you know we even managed to win an Award of Excellence from Docs Without Borders Film Festival last month. Please take the time to check out this inspiring guy. Thanks and enjoy!

MS victim, Kenn Madruga, doesn't let anything stop him from building a competitive dream drag race car from a 64' Dodge Dart with no sponsor, on his own dime...

07/30/2020

MS victim, Kenn Madruga, let's nothing stand in the way of pursuing his passion for drag racing as he builds his car to be a winner. Here's the trailer. The film was just submitted into the CINEMA TOUCHING DISABILITY Film Festival.

05/26/2020

Check out my blog about how well the Lumix S1H combines with a Ronin-S for production.

Lumix DC-S1H and Ronin-S, made for each other, but… I’ve blogged a few times about how nicely the full-frame Lumix S1H works into my Panasonic AU-EVA1 package with its very closely matching specs, color science, and look. Having a V-log, 14+ stops, 10 bit, 422, mirrorless DSLR as a second camera...

05/23/2020

A couple weeks ago I made my first attempt at star photography with average results because I had to trigger the shutter at the camera, introducing a tiny amount of overall motion blur. A couple nights ago on a moonless night I was able to trigger the shutter remotely and got much better results, (less blur) but still learned a couple things that's pretty basic to veteran star photographers. The earth moves faster than we perceive. Leaving the shutter open much longer than 15 seconds shows this quite apparently. A little over 500 yards per second. After 15 seconds the earth has spun over 4.2 miles. When I magnify the images, I can still see very slight elongation in the star's shape due to that much earth movement. Thus is why star photographers know to use high ISO settings and wide open aperture thus to reduce shutter open time, minimizing earth movement.

The house image was tricky to capture because I wanted the shutter open 15 seconds to capture the stars but didn't want the lights in the house to become overexposed. So I had my lovely wife turn off the interiors light 3 seconds into the 15 second exposure. And because I wanted the house facade to have some light, I panned a flashlight over all the facade in about a 2 second span to get the correct amount of simulated moonlight exposure.

The landscape image is from our back deck looking toward Sierra Blanca using two photos. One, just after sunset where the sky silhouettes the mountains and trees at about 60th of a second. The second, an hour later to expose the stars for 15 seconds. In Photoshop the photos align perfectly and it's a matter of blending the two together to reveal the stars but keeping the twilight silhouettes. The sunset image froze the trees in place, but in the star shot the trees were quite blurry due to wind moving them over the course of 15 seconds. So I was careful to not reveal the blurry trees too much. A reasonable result overall, but I'm looking to get better at this.