Below are three of the seven videos I designed and produced in 2009 for my wife, metalsmith Heather Reilly as she developed her LifeChain concept into the one of a kind work of art she’s wearing in this photo.
 
Created for a jewelry and sculpture exhibition in San Diego, the LifeChain was a long time in development and I thought the concept was so powerful that only Heather’s voice could really articulate it, and that video was the best medium because we get the viewer into the jewelry studio to actually see what heather is talking about.

Each episode is 3 minutes or so edited down from 15-20 minutes of footage. The episodes were very lightly scripted, more just a guideline for what Heather wanted to say and show, but have been very effective in driving attention and traffic to her site-- the third video in the series has been viewed over 15,000 times in the last 18 months!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SNCseVDjwM

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZsEDi9MpJs

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3z3Lx4Ok_4

So just in time for tonight’s “premiere” of full time lapse film of my architectural mural painting at Orchids and Onions back in San Diego, I finally finished editing up the first of three trailers I’m doing to assemble material for final “director’s cut” that incorporates photographer Mike Brown‘s time-lapse document along with my own pictures and process video.

I’m trying to set up an understandable context for the explosion of imagery that happens in Mike’s eight minute film that covers four weeks of me working large in a temporary commercial studio space in San Diego last September and October. Check it out!

San Diego Cityscape Mural on Vertical Blinds from John Hiemstra on Vimeo.

Pittsburgh, to be honest, has turned out to be a very rich place and robust place to put down business roots in a generally cold and uncertain business environment and at almost exactly one year to date of my arrival here fresh from the San Diego cityscape mural project, I feel like those roots are somewhat settled in for some real growth now.
 
Today, I’m actually balancing two different demands from two different businesses that are both my own, and the demands are mostly for new work in new opportunities on top of current obligations, both consulting and painting.
 
What I’ve come to realize (among other things) is that the two endeavors are more similar than is obvious, given the project design and production sequence and skills involved in custom service.
 
It is of course, truly wonderful to have appreciative and serious demand for your services as an independent business in this day and age, and as biz grows and work distribution shifts to larger team (coming soon, I believe) I’m looking forward to doing more kinds of stuff that’s had to wait in the life remodel of the last 18 months.
 
Near the top of my list is to edit and release literally tons of video and photos of some more cool San Diego custom art/contracting projects to satisfy that business itch, and in the anticipation I realized I had never shared this faux finish video I made back in 2007. A reasonably successful marketing experiment with 12,000 page views on last three years and consistent traffic drip to my main site with little to no help from me-- this is first time in either painting blog, website or other social media (I just posted tonight on my Facebook page, too.)
 
So check it out and just ignore the outdated titles for now-- I just made a new set for new video project on the way soon.

Here’s a quick video I made about my new show of original paintings at Joseph Bedford’s gallery and furniture shop in Little Italy on July 1 as part of the new NoLi Nights.

I started these paintings in 2007, part of a series that actually started itself in 2003, and haven’t worked on any of these paintings in over two years until now.