Video

I shot and edited this video for Blue Sky Robotics. It was originally a hero video for the website home page, but I later added the logo to the bottom corner and the animation to the end so it could be used in presentations and for general use.

I edited the video together in Adobe Premiere Pro. I created the logo animation and the blue and green bounding boxes in Adobe After Effects. The bounding boxes are actually a real part of the Blue Sky Robotics vision model, but they are always a set color, so I animated these in order to match the BSR branding colors.

I created this short video for a class as a way to practice shooting and editing together different types of clips. The video was a simple concept, but I wanted to use the opportunity to practice various principles of video production, such as using different angles, wide and closeup shots, continuity, etc.

Julian Cochran is a high school computer science teacher in Durham, North Carolina. Aside from his work at school, he is a passionate musician, soccer coach, hiking enthusiast, and father to three daughters.

When he was forty years old, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Thankfully, his cancer was caught early enough that after a surgery and three months of chemotherapy, he was pronounced officially cancer-free. Julian’s experience with the disease opened his eyes to the realities cancer patients must face on a daily basis, but it also taught him how to appreciate life.

When he was going through treatment, Julian rarely had opportunities to sit and reflect on what a serious situation he was in because he was dealing with his diagnosis on a treatment-to-treatment basis. It was not until after he was declared cancer-free that Julian was able to look back on the gravity of his experience. As he was leaving UNC Hospitals for the last time, he stopped on the bridge over Manning Drive to simply look out over the road and think about what he had been through and what would come next. This was one of the most effective moments in his life.

Ten years later, I asked my dad to tell me his story about a moment of clarity in his life. This is the story he gave me.

The year of this video, Julian thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. He began the journey in February after the video was filmed and reached the summit of Mount Katahdin, the end of the trail, in July. This hike had always been a life goal of his, but going through his experience with cancer truly cemented that plan for him, since it was in many ways a celebration of the life he can live because he won his battle with cancer.