Introduction

I often video-tape nature adventures around me, and sometimes invent fantasy adventures via computer-generated graphics. I edit the videos myself, and often add my own musical compositions to the mix. My wife and I also enjoy traveling, and I will sometimes take videos of our trips to Bryce Canyon, Big Sur, China, local Renaissance Faires, kayaking, etc. Just the interesting bits, of course :-)

Most of my videos are on Youtube here, and some others are on Vimeo here.

Here is a quick 'Demo Reel' with some of my computer animations, wildlife photography, and music:

A few quick examples are below.

Dance of the Technoids - Music Video

Bouncy Electropop music with aliens dancing around large lava lamps (suggesting that music is literally "universal".) Reaching into my 1980's musical subconscious, I wrote a catchy "Depeche Mode"-like techno-flamenco tune, and then created a mosh pit of Technoids dancing to the music in a hyper-realistic dance hall called "The Candy Bar". Music written note by note in Harmony Assistant (www.myriad-online.com) and finished/EQed in GarageBand. Live acoustic Spanish guitar performed by Ian Beardsley. Video rendered with POV-Ray Mac (mac.povray.org), and assembled in iMovie. For the technically curious, there are over 1,200 lines of POV-Ray code (all written by hand in the text language, no modelers were harmed...) to create this. The 2.5 minute movie (in final anti-aliased form) took about 14 continuous hours to render all the frames on an old dual 1 Ghz G4 Mac.

Great Horned Owlets Branching

Great horned owls (Bubo virginianus) tend to get a jump on Spring and raise their babies right away. After a nest fell apart in a local park, rescuers put up a laundry basket, and the owls came back and had FOUR baby owlets this year! Owls do not build their own nests, instead taking over whatever nest or cliff hole (or laundry basket!) they can find! Baby owls are called owlets, although these adoraballs are often called Fluff-Muppets, or dryer-lint-monsters :-) (And for the safety and health of this hard-working family, I do not disclose where they are... people can scare them and stress them.)

These were shot at a respectful distance at 600mm and cropped in more. Shot with my Canon EOS 90D, and my Tamron 150-600mm telephoto. Music: Mars à oublier, by SchwanSongs

Celestial Dance - Aurora Borealis 2024

Celestial Dance - After a lifetime of hoping for a good time and place to see the Northern lights, we finally were showered with the most amazing dancing display… our first time seeing them was just breathtaking! We drove north just over the border into BC Canada from Bellingham, Washington USA last night around 10 PM to set up cameras in a little dark farm field, and we were overwhelmed by the vast dancing lights… absolutely stunning! As a kid I envisioned Mother Earth with a shield battling the rain of gamma particles. This music video is a collection of some of the photos and time-lapse videos I took with my Canon DSLR and my GoPro. The music is an old Steampunk space-fantasy piece I wrote years ago, which seems to fit perfectly.

Here's the original back-story for the music, "Metamorphosis - NGC6302": Wings of Chaos, Wings of Beauty. H. G. Wells awakens from cyber-sleep in the "Chrysalis." His steam-driven moth-ship is now traveling slowly across an immense nebula. the engine's motoric rhythm generates the soundtrack to the view from his window. He is enraptured by the beauty of this explosion, frozen in time. It is a transition from a star to a cloud. A transition from a caterpillar to a butterfly. Incomprehensible in its immense beauty.

Dreamy Alt-World Kayaking

The Kayaking Underworld

Time to drift into an alternate dreamy time while kayaking on the lake... some lazy drifting music to accompany the mesmerizing forests we paddled through today, both "enhanced" and normal. Enjoy!

Condors in Flight-Big Sur (Director's cut)

(Re-Edited/updated version of this popular video)

A gathering of over 15 California Condors, 10 feet from a growing crowd of awe-struck passers-by... in Big Sur along the picturesque California Highway 1.

Soon after my wife and I pulled over and set up the video camera, other people began stopping to see these grand birds too. The more people showed up, the more condors flew up to the other side of the guard rail, just as curious as we were. Soon a Ventana Wildlife worker stopped by, gave us some information on the condors (recorded in this video) and then had to shoo the birds off to a safer distance.

Here is a 10 minute segment of footage of these birds close up, people-watching, cuddling with each other, sun-bathing with wings out, and soaring majestically.

I hope you are as entranced as we were! Some additional condor information from the USA National Park Service (Thanks Michael Jay): https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/caco-world-2021.htm

Copyright 2008, Eduard Schwan, all rights reserved

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