Author: Tim

In 2017 I created a YouTube channel that I hoped would inform and educate adventure motorcycle travelers. Since then MOTOTREK has grown to almost 200k subscribers and serves up more than 7M video views a year.

Each video takes about a day to film and a couple of days of post. I shoot on the GH5, sometimes with my friend David Fox on second camera, and edit in Resolve. I rely on the amazing Matt Jorgensen for short-turnaround custom music that makes the videos shine.

I’ve produced nearly 100 episodes so far, shooting at locations across the western US and India. Here are a few of my favorites.

Towards the end of 2020, in the heat of the wackiest US election season ever, Michel Hansmire at Sparkworks Media hired me to shoot a series of spots for The Partnership for Energy Progress. Due to COVID restrictions we kept the crew to just four people, the producer-director, director of photography, gaffer and make-up. We shot at a restaurant in Seattle’s Rainier Valley and at a dairy farm in Woodinville, WA.

In 2019 I had the pleasure of working with producer Karla Murthy on two episodes of Playing by the Rules: Ethics at Work for PBS out of NYC. We shot the the “Bank Job” episode in Yakima, WA, and “Driven” in Portland, OR.

I don’t typically assume the responsibility of producing. It’s not my forte. However I’ve had the pleasure of working with SouthSound 911 for over a decade and when they asked me to create a behind the scenes video to give the community an inside look at the creation of their new state-of-the-art communications facility I was excited to sign on. I shot and edited this video. Plus I got to ride in a fire truck and on a police boat.

This video project started in 2017 and wrapped in January 2020, just in time before the world shut down. Construction of the facility continued through 2020 and I expect to produce a follow-up video in the summer of 2020.

I got to shoot a series of short videos working with producer Michel Hansmire at Sparkworks Media. We’d hire a local grip with a small grip and lighting package in each town.

Back in the mid 2000’s I shot handful of episodes of EXPOSÉ: America’s Investigative Reports, a national series produced by WNET (NYC PBS) as part of the Bill Moyers Journal, that profiled the work of leading investigative journalists. It was an excellent show but unfortunately only lasted a couple of seasons. The Quid Pro Quo episode was nominated for a national Emmy.

The on-location production team was simply myself and a producer-director. We traveled light, shooting on mini-DV tapes with a DVX100 and a couple of Kino Flo’s for about a week per episode. The days were long and rates low, but I thoroughly enjoyed working every minute.

PBS no longer hosts the episodes online, and the copies that exist are low quality.
Here are a few of my favorite episodes.

Three blasts from the past — 2005 to be exact!

I still love watching these low-budget spots I shot many years ago on the Panasonic DVX100 @ 480p.

Origin Records is a Seattle-based independent jazz label, run for musicians by musicians. These spots were directed by Steven Rosario Barron and ran on cable TV in Seattle, back when cable TV was the best way to get the word out 🙂