The Bike Happening - Part 1

Three years ago I met with my friend Todd at Linnaea's Coffee Shop in the heart of downtown SLO. I had just come from a filmmaker's forum at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival (SLOIFF) and I told him that I had resolved to make a documentary.

We discussed an idea that he'd been kicking around for a while. He told me he'd always been fascinated by a much-loved local event known as Bike Night. We decided to start filming the monthly ride…

…in December 2008 we completed the final edit of our documentary, which we named The Bike Happening, and submitted it to the 2009 SLOIFF. I was pretty confident that it would get selected, because I thought we'd done a good job of capturing the atmosphere and emotion of the happening, but you can never be sure. Then, a couple of weeks ago we heard the news…

The Bike Happening has been selected for screening as part of the SLOIFF Central Coast Filmmaker’s Showcase.

Doesn't that sound fancy?

The showing takes place on Monday, March 9th at 6pm at the Downtown Brew (right across the street from Linnaea's) and is followed by a short question and answer session. Come on down and check it out!

Rick Teed, Napa Consultants and Red Canary

It seems like 2008 was a good year for collaborations, which actually makes me feel pretty good, as one of the aims of seven and eight is to be part of a community.

For our first project together, I was hired by Napa Consultants to make an extended series of video shorts for their client, Rick Teed. Rick is a dynamic and creative real estate agent and developer, based in San Francisco. As his focus is the luxury real estate market, I knew that the project would require high quality footage.

With this in mind, I turned to my friend and colleague Todd Peterson of Red Canary Productions. Todd and I have worked on a number of projects together over the last two years (including a half-hour documentary that we wrote and directed - more about that soon), so I knew he’d be able to deliver.

We traveled to San Francisco for the shoot and after filming at five locations were able to complete 28 short video clips with custom titles and a theme tune (written by another top collaborator, Darren Clarke of Modern Music Academy).

Here’s one of them.