"A Day in the Life with the Byrd Family" | Serendipity Studios

We spent an afternoon shooting with Bryan and Jenni and their two very active sons .. Calvin and Drew. Shooting a pair of rambunctious boys is quite a challenge, but we captured some awesome footage. We also had a great interview with the mother. All of this combined in post for what we feel is a remarkable representation of the identity of this family.

We just previewed the video for the mother on the big screen in our theater and she was in tears within seconds. I really love my job sometimes!

Anyways, I hope you enjoy watching something a little different. d;-)

"A Day in the Life" with the Byrd Family on Vimeo

[Eugene Brown]

Nice clip! Loved the steadicam work!

[Matt Barwick]

Nice job Travis and great execution. What a great idea and precious memento for them to have.

Cheers,

MB

[Louis Maddalena]

Loved it, and I only had one problem with it... I kept wanting to see the mom talk as she was being interviews.. .maybe a few cuts to her for a 2-3 seconds each or less even would have helped. When she was smiling saying something about the boys, or other reaction to her words.

[Travis Cossel]

Thanks Eugene and Matt!

Louis, I understand where you're coming from. It is common practice to reveal the individual being interviewed at some point.

However, for us and for this piece, we didn't want to do that. We wanted this to be a visual experience. We wanted the interview audio to drive the progression of the visuals. It was not our goal to create an 'interview' piece, if that makes sense. We did still 'reveal' the mother in one of the early shots, and we felt this was a more subtle method for showing who was talking.

In the end it was a creative choice for us based on what we thought would have the most impact on the family. Obviously you don't know the mother, so you have that desire to see her onscreen talking. But the family knows their mother, so it's not necessary for them to see her talking. Instead, it's more powerful for them to hear her words and see their family in action. This was the motivation behind our creative direction.

A nice side benefit from this creative choice was that we captured some really special content from the interview session. The mother was very comfortable talking to us because she knew she wasn't on camera. Being on camera can make people tighten up and over-think things, and this allowed us to just have a chat with the mother. It was wonderful.

Anyways, thanks for the comments and hopefully my explanation of our creative decision made some sense. d;-)

[Marty Welk]

nice i am glad i watched it.
now i toss in a comment that is JUST a comment from MY perspective (not meant to hack on your work) the color looks strange on my monitor, it was as if there was this orange filter mushing up the picture the whole time, very perfectally consistant, but not color i like.

[Travis Cossel]

Marty, thanks for watching! I wish I could comment more on the color grading but I'm not quite sure what it looks like on your computer. We did slant the footage more towards a warm look, since it was an overcast fall day and we didn't want the video to feel cool or cold.

[Jason Robinson]

I also noticed the orange / warn tint, possibly because I have noticed your tendency to color grade in post.

However, the emotional content of the piece eventually overpowered my observation of the grading, which means the story progressed and held my attention well.

[Travis Cossel]

Yeah, we've developed a bit of a signature color look that we implement on both the cinematography and photography side. You'll notice even the still images matched the video. It's always been a pet peeve of mine when I see a videographer combine a photographer's stills into a video and the two mediums don't match up ... especially when the color work on the stills makes the video look bad. d;-)

Anyways, thanks for the comments. Our color look isn't for everyone, but our clients sure seem to love it .. and for me, that's what matters.

[Patrick Moreau]

travis,

i thought it was a super clean clip, i thought the color was especially stand out for me and emotionally was very connected to the piece, and i agree about your integration of the stills and their toning. bravo as well for finding a new niche with this one and hopefully many more to come. you keep doing them like this and you will need to chare more than a wedding.

P.

[Travis Cossel]

P, thanks for checking it out and commenting. This was a concept I had been wanting to shoot for more than a year now, and we finally got around to doing one. Glad you enjoyed it. I'm especially glad you liked how the stills were incorporated. That's something I've been experimenting with a lot lately.

To be honest, I walked away from the shoot a bit scared. I had no idea if I had enough usable footage. The two boys wanted nothing to do with each other, and weren't really interested in interacting with mom and dad either. Not to mention I'm not used to shooting kids that never stop moving. d;-)

[Oleg Kalyan]

Travis, nice clip!
Funny thing, one of my Russian colleagues emailed me the link a few days ago,
really enjoyed it, after all filming family happiness can be heart warming a very rewarding
experience!

[Travis Cossel]

Thanks, Oleg! It was a lot fun to piece it all together. d;-)