Pete and Jane – A stop-motion short

For our Advanced Video Production final project in May 2011, we were asked to create a stop-motion video involving one of the most famous child’s toys in history: Mr. Potato Head. While it seemed simpler to create a comedy out of this assignment, I wanted to see if it was possible to, in just 3 minutes, create an emotional attachment between the viewer and this little inanimate object. Hopefully, I’ve succeeded.

In all honesty, I found this project significantly more difficult than any other I’ve done before; each picture took up about 4 frames, which there are 30 of in a second, so editing together just 5 seconds of this piece took about an hour.

I hope you enjoy it, and thanks as always for watching.

The pictures were shot with a Canon Rebel T2i

Music credit: “Love is All”, by The Tallest Man on Earth, the entire inspiration for this script.

Prepare for Takeoff – Trailer

Here’s a trailer for the piece I’m working on right now. The short documentary focuses on what goes into the rivalry the Dayton men’s basketball team has with Xavier University. For this piece, we interviewed current players, as well as UD’s all-time leading scorer, Roosevelt Chapman, and last year’s alumni, London Warren and Mickey Perry. We were granted unprecedented student access to sit on the floor and film the four games leading up to the clash with Xavier on February 27th, 2011. This is the first trailer, and the whole piece should be complete within a few weeks.

The Immaculate Party

This piece was shot and edited from November to December 2010. This is also the longest piece to date I’ve shot, clocking in at around 12 minutes. I also never thought I’d enjoy filming/editing a piece more, until I got to “Prepare for Takeoff”, the trailer for which is right before this post. Anyway, here’s the description as seen on Vimeo:

On December 7th, the boys of 104 Woodland at the University of Dayton threw a party for 425 guests.

A week before, they began building a full-size bar from scratch.

This short documentary captures the week before the party, from the original idea to the final product.

Directed, Written, and Narrated by Justin Harenchar.

Special thanks to Luke Effler, Patrick Donnelly, Charles Riley, Dan Perchinsky, Johnny Maddock, Dan Sullivan, and Sam Wagner.

Featuring music by Matt & Kim, Kanye West, Linkin Park, The Beatles, Pharoahe Monch, Jay-Z, and Mumford and Sons.

“The March to UD Arena” – February 24th, 2010

Since this is supposed to be a showcase of my filmmaking abilities, let’s start with the first piece I ever made (that wasn’t totally embarrassing and way too amateur-ish to post on here.) While this does have a low resolution quality to it, being shot on a small handheld camera, I still like the way the style of the piece captured the feeling of the day. This ended up being used in the rallying e-mail sent out to the entire campus for the 2011 Dayton/Xavier game, as well.