After a several month hiatus, I’m happy to be blogging again, this time about a fun project I had the pleasure to work on earlier this year.

Sometime in the spring, my husband Robert, who if you’ve read the posts on my other blog you’ll know was Justin Bieber’s tour photographer, was contacted by the father of a a girl named Ellie Wessinger, a huge Bieber fan. Ellie and her best friend Lizzie Halper, both of whom had caught “Bieber Fever”, started writing a book about their idol. They wanted to self-publish and needed good pictures to go along with the text. After getting approval from Bieber’s team, Robert agreed to have his photos be a big part of the book and I was brought into the project as the designer.

The process of writing, proof-reading, picking 100+ photos (out of thousands from Robert’s archives) and designing the book took several months. By late summer we received the first color proofs and after a few weeks of revisions we were excited to have everything ready for the printer. Last month we were finally able to hold the first copies in our hands and couldn’t believe how amazing the final product looked!

The book, entitled “Got Bieber Fever?” and available on Amazon, makes for a fun read, describing the six stages of “Bieber Fever”, while giving some information that every Belieber should know about. It also includes letters from other fans, compatibility quizzes, and the dust jacket unfolds into a giant poster! I’m sure fans will love it.

For those interested, you’ll be happy to know that all the proceeds go to Pencils of Promise, a non-profit organization that builds schools in the developing world. Money raised just from the first print run alone will build TWO schools!

You can get more details about the story behind this book by downloading the press release or reading the article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

You can order one below and all profits will go to Red Cross. I also thought it would be fun to offer them as a free download for your computer desktop to raise awareness for the Japan relief effort.

Click on the images to download the wallpapers.

Click below to order a t-shirt. All profits will be donated to Red Cross to support relief efforts in Japan. Save $10 on orders of $50 and up using the coupon code SPRING2011.

About a week ago I was asked to edit a video for the New York Times. It was for an article on tween idol Justin Bieber, who I hadn’t really heard of until Robert Caplin told me he had an assignment to photograph him at a concert last month at Madison Square Garden. He was asked to shoot still photographs only, but he decided to take some video footage as well, and it turned out to be fun content the NY Times ultimately wanted to include with their article about Bieber.

My job was to edit together the video footage and photographs that Robert captured during the concert, showing not only the concert itself but also the backstage going-ons and Bieber’s warm-up session with singer Usher.

When I first began working with the footage, I used several interesting video clips, but then I realized the photos Robert had taken worked even better with the audio captured from his videos. I ended up using around three dozen photographs in all throughout the 2.5 minute video, which I felt helped tell the story… after all, he was commissioned to shoot stills, so why not take advantage of them?

The funniest parts while editing the video was going through the footage of the young girls going nuts in the front row blowing out the sound levels. I also enjoyed Bieber’s walk through the halls in route to the stage when all the girls were clawing after him. In all honestly, I ended up getting a headache after hearing the screams over and over again during the few days it took me to edit the video. I could imagine there’s a bottle of aspirin in Justin’s mom’s purse!
Big thanks to Tay James, Justin Bieber’s tour DJ, for letting us use some of the audio he recorded during the concert.

This turned out to be a fun little project for me. Just like every time I edit a music video, the songs are now stuck in my head and I can’t stop singing “One Less Lonely Girl” and “U Got It Bad”! Ahhh, make it stop!

Check out Robert’s blog post here and the New York Times article here.

Happy New Year everyone!

Click here to read Robert’s Blog which goes into greater detail about the production.

About a year ago, I received an email from a Belgium-based yacht dealer who was in need of a new Flash website. He tried to build his own without much success and decided to look for professional help –always the best option.

Des Voiles D’Or (The Golden Sails) is the name of his business, and his website project sounded exciting yet overwhelming at the same time. It would have to show the excitement of sailing yachts, the essence of Italy (because these yachts are Italian), adventure, nice background music, and the most important request from the client was: “an intro animation where you can see the sails clapping in the wind”.
I knew he was envisioning a slick video of rich people sailing on their fancy yachts in the Mediterranean Sea, but how was I supposed to make that happen?

A couple of weeks after this, he hired a photographer and flew to Italy for a photo shoot and then provided me with all the pictures. He also obtained a promotional video from one of the brands he sells and cut the clips together with the photos and text he provided, and finally added an intriguing music track. Check out the result here.

Despite the fact that the website had many sections, the design process was smoother than I’d imagined. I began by designing a site map that helped me keep organized -I always try to do this when a website has many sections and subsections-. This is what the site map looked like after a couple of revisions from the client:

Afterward, I sent him my first drafts of the website. He liked them so much that I only had to refine a few details.
Here’s a comparison of an early draft vs. the final product:

initial draft

final design

Once the design was completed I worked with one of my programmers, Fabio Pinatti, to complete the backend of the website.

www.desvoilesdor.com successfully launched on March 2009.

Thank you for visiting and I hope you enjoy the rest of this website.