A Walk in Jersey City

Time for a new video and probably one of my best to date, if I say so myself! I wanted to do a film on the sights of Jersey City. While I didn’t get to every section in Jersey City; I think I managed to show the city in a good light. Then MTV will air the Snooki and JWow spin-off of them living in Jersey City and everything I did will be thrown out the window haha.

I wanted to do something similar to what Woody Allen did in the beginning of Midnight in Paris. Just nice music with various cuts of places in the city. In this case, I used Debussy’s “Claire De Lune,” known mostly from Ocean’s 11 fountain scene at the end of the movie. I just love that piece, and it works with practically anything. I tried to cover a lot of areas in the downtown area like parks, restaurants, the waterfront and monuments. Just lots of places I like to visit and eat at. I gotta have shots of The Light Horse Tavern and Paulus Hook Pizza in there!

I shot this video over two weekends. The first weekend I shot mostly handheld and found that some shots I loved, but were too shaky for what I wanted to do. So I went back to re-shoot some things the following weekend and think everything came out well in the end. I walked over to Grove Street area, and took some shots of the mural on Christopher Columbus Dr. Van Vorst Park is a nice area and wanted to film around there and went back to that area twice. Of course I wanted to film in my neighborhood of Paulus Hook, the nicest section of JC in my opinion. The waterfront is such a beautiful spot to walk, which I do often. It’s got great views of Manhattan, Statue of Liberty, Colgate Clock, and it’s just nice walking along the Hudson River.

Technical side of things, I used my Canon XF100 camera with a custom profile, but a lot of my shots were tweaked in Premiere Pro and Magic Bullet Looks. I wanted to add a little bit of warm hue to the shots and I’m always a fan of black contrast so I went that route as well. I think I’m getting better at shooting, and editing as well. I still have some things I want to work on, but I’m very happy with what I shot. Hope you guys like it too! Let me know what you think in the comments!

Tags: Canon XF100, clair de lune, claude debussy, empire state building, grove street, JC, jersey city, jersey city waterfront, new jersey, paulus hook, van vorst park, video, World Trade Center