Videos – Page 2 – Michael Rappa

Down in Mexico: The Movie

January 13, 2014 Michael Rappa3 Comments

This is a compilation of the mini-videos I shot during my October 2013 trip to Mexico, highlighted by my visits to the pyramid sites of Teotihuacan, Uxmal, and Chichen Itza. Mostly absent are my stays in Merida and Cancun, as I neglected to take video in those cities.

I apologize for the jerkiness of the zooms, but the manual zoom lens of my new camera does not lend itself well to smooth zooming. I tried to smooth out some of the zooms by slowing the video down, with mixed results. This is one case where my older camera (with its auto-zoom) would have been preferable, but I wasn’t about to haul two cameras all over Mexico. 🙂

For musical accompaniment, having already used most of the other pieces from Holst’s The Planets for previous movies, I decided it was time to use Mars, The Bringer of War. I think it fits pretty well with the visions of the pyramids.

The video quality defaults to 360p, but you can increase this up to 1080p if you want to view it in higher quality.

My Villa in Tuscany

May 6, 2013 Michael RappaLeave a comment

This video is a tour of the grounds surrounding the villa I lived in for two weeks outside of Florence, Italy in 2011. You may have already seen this if you read Part 1 of my Eurotrip journal, though the video is now much smoother thanks to youtube’s smoothing software (with the minor side effect of wacky looking text at the beginning).

The villa was over 100 years old and full of character. The view of the Tuscan countryside from the gazebo was sublime: the hills, the olive groves, the other villas; very peaceful. And on the other end of the grounds I could see Florence in the valley below—an amazing view at night. It’s not difficult to understand why someone would decide to drop everything and move to Tuscany; it’s such an easy place to fall in love with.

My Trip to Peru: The Movie

April 12, 2013 Michael RappaLeave a comment

This is a video montage of my August 2012 trip to Peru, including my visits to the Sacred Valley and my hike of the Inca Trail. This is the same video that appeared in my journal, so you may have already seen it, but I wanted it to have its own page in my videos section. The background music is In the Lap of the Gods by the Alan Parsons Project, which I thought was a fitting piece to accompany the visuals.

Eurotrip 2009: The Movie

April 2, 2013 Michael Rappa6 Comments

I finally got around to compiling the little videos I shot during my 2009 Eurotrip into a movie. These were shot with my old pocket camera, so it’s not HD video quality and I didn’t have the ability to zoom in and out during shooting, but it’s still a decent companion piece to my journal.

Dubrovnik, Croatia

March 26, 2013 Michael RappaLeave a comment

I stumbled across a few small videos I shot while in Croatia in November of 2011 that I forgot to include in my main Eurotrip 2011 video, so I thought I’d compile them here.

In honor of the upcoming season premiere of Game of Thrones and Dubrovnik’s connection to the show, I have scored the video with the main theme from the series.

I chose to smooth-out the video using youtube’s smoothing software, which resulted in quite wacky behavior of the title captions at the beginning, but the rest of the video is nice and smooth, so once you get past the opening captions, it’s smooth sailing—do you think I used the word ‘smooth’ enough in that last sentence? 🙂

See photos from Dubrovnik

Eurotrip 2011: The Video

March 16, 2013 Michael RappaLeave a comment

I thought I’d kick off the new Videos section of this blog with the very first video I made from one of my trips. This video covers most of my month in Europe in 2011, including visits to Italy, Switzerland, and Croatia.

This video is nearly 18 minutes long, so I’ll understand if you don’t want to sit through the whole thing :-), but it is accompanied by a couple of pleasant pieces from Holst’s The Planets.