Monday January 20th, 2020 kicking off this weeks Vlog/Blog I will be sharing an incredible story from the Ace Of Spades in Sacramento, CA. I had the pleasure of interviewing the lead singer Chris Hodges and drummer Zak St. John from the Linkin Park Experience “In The End” tribute band.
The bands mission statement is they are not here to replicate. They are here to celebrate one of the best bands in the world and one of the greatest rockstars in the world; as well as, stop the stigma of mental health. Linkin Park Experience “In The End” Tribute band has been together a little over a year. They are partnered with 320 Change Direction where a portion of their proceeds are donated.
The band had incredible energy and had everyone jumping all night long!! After their performance they stayed till the very end to meet everyone and to hear their stories. To find out more information on the band please follow them on social media @InTheEndTribute; as we all as, there website: https://www.intheendtribute.com. To find out more information on Mental Health please visit: https://www.changedirection.org.
I hope you enjoy this fun packed video. For an extended interview stay tuned for The SacTown Insider Rogue Edition and SacTown Underground for air dates. I look forward to bringing you the next adventure next week!
Please consider subscribing and liking my channel it would mean a lot to me to have you participate; as well as, if you’d like to be on the show send me a email:
Monday January 13th, 2020 we rewind back to my incredible packed week. We had 9 stories that took us on an incredible journey. I am delivering 5 of 7 this week. Two stories are still in production unfortunately. I am not able to release information at this time.
Kicking off this weeks Vlog/Blog I will be sharing a story in studio at Access Sacramento. Our very own sports commentator Keith Jouganatos had the pleasure of interviewing #30 Forward Zeus McClurkin from the Harlem Globetrotters.
Zeus McClurkin is a testament to not giving up or letting obstacles get in the way of achieving one’s dreams. He was cut from every basketball team he tried out for from seventh grade through tenth grade, but he kept pushing and finally made his high school team his junior and senior seasons. He played his first couple of years of college ball at a Division II program, but the departure of the head coach left Zeus on the outside looking in. Undeterred, he enrolled at North Carolina A&T State University, and he made the basketball team as a walk-on, beating out 30 other hopefuls in the process. Zeus earned an undergraduate degree in business management at North Carolina A&T and then a master’s degree in marketing and communications from Franklin University, based in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Zeus is also one of the most decorated athletes on the Globetrotters roster holding three Guinness World Records titles. Zeus has set the mark for most basketball slam dunks in one minute, with 16 (2017), most bounced three-pointers in one minute, with five (2017), and most behind-the-back three-pointers, with three baskets made (2018). Zeus is known for his fun personality and crazy trick shots from places like Ohio State and the Mall of America, which have been featured on ESPN. Since joining the Globetrotters, he’s also transcended language barriers with appearances on popular Spanish-language television shows like Univision’s “Republica Deportiva,” and Telemundo’s “Un Nuevo Dia.” He has accomplished all of this while dealing with exercise-induced asthma, a narrowing of the airways in the lungs that is triggered by strenuous exercise. To this day, Zeus carries an inhaler with him.
I hope you enjoy this fun packed video. For an extended interview stay tuned for The SacTown Insider Rogue Edition and SacTown Underground for air dates. I look forward to bringing you the next adventure next week!
Please consider subscribing and liking my channel it would mean a lot to me to have you participate; as well as, if you’d like to be on the show send me a email:
Monday January 6th, 2019 we rewind back to my incredible packed week. We had 6 stories that took us on an incredible journey. I am delivering 6 of 7 this week. Two stories are still in production unfortunately. I am not able to release information at this time.
Kicking off this weeks Vlog/Blog I will be sharing a story of dance. My team and I visited the auditorium inside the Coloma Center in Sacramento, CA where our very own Celestial Thomas interviewed Sandra Aamodt the organizer of Country Contra Dance. Contra dance (also contradance, contra-dance and other variant spellings) is a folk dance made up of long lines of couples. … The dance is led by a caller who teaches the sequence of figures in the dance before the music starts. After the interview we had the pleasure of witnessing a live band playing as a group of people gathered together to dance and smile with one another.
I hope you enjoy this fun packed video. For an extended interview stay tuned for The SacTown Insider Rogue Edition and SacTown Underground for air dates. I look forward to bringing you the next adventure next week!
Please consider subscribing and liking my channel it would mean a lot to me to have you participate; as well as, if you’d like to be on the show send me a email: TheSacTownInsider@Gmail.Com
Monday December 30th, 2019 I am counting down the days until we enter an exciting new year. To start the year I will be taking a grand trip to Las Vegas for my very first CES press conference! I am incredibly excited to take on my journey to check out all the magnificent releases for the 2021 releases.
Okay now we rewind back to my incredible packed week. We had 6 stories that took us on an incredible journey. I am delivering 5 of 7 this week. Two stories are still in production unfortunately. I am not able to release information at this time.
Kicking off this weeks Vlog/Blog I will be sharing a success story of a business man who has graced us with his presence. My team and I had the pleasure of meeting comedian Stephan Sanders at laughs Unlimited in Old Sacramento. Stephan was the host and headliner of Holiday Funny Jam along with comedians Tay Livingston, Bernie Onassis, Ricco Da Great, and DJ Marcus Pierce. We also had the pleasure of having Stephan in studio where our very own Celestial Thomas got to interview Stephan. Look out for features dates with Stephan to catch his comedy act. As well as feature dates on SacTown Underground and The SacTown Insider to watch Stephan Sanders interview.
I hope you enjoy this fun packed video where our very own Celestial Thomas went live with Trevor to talk about upcoming events. For an extended interview stay tuned for The SacTown Insider Rogue Edition in January. I look forward to bringing you the next adventure next week!
Please consider subscribing and liking my channel it would mean a lot to me to have you participate; as well as, if you’d like to be on the show send me a email:
Monday December 23, 2019 I am counting down the days until we enter an exciting new year. To start the year I will be taking a grand trip to Las Vegas for my very first CES press conference! I am incredibly excited to take on my journey to check out all the magnificent releases for the 2020 releases.
Okay now we rewind back to my incredible packed week. We had 6 stories that took us on an incredible journey. I am delivering 4 of 6 this week. Two stories are still in production unfortunately. I am not able to release information at this time.
I have two segments I will be sharing with you:
SacTown Mens Entrepreneurs
SacTown Womens Entrepreneurs
Kicking off our SacTown Mens Entrepreneurs segment will be a success story of a business man who has graced us with his charm. A road map to a brilliant young man by the name of Trevor Fong he is the creator of Mix and Mingle which is a business networking event as well as a social club for everyone to join. My team and I had the pleasure of meeting Trevor at the Mix in Downtown Sacramento for the last event of the year.
I hope you enjoy this fun packed video where our very own Celestial Thomas went live with Trevor to talk about upcoming events. For an extended interview stay tuned for The SacTown Insider Rogue Edition in January. I look forward to bringing you the next adventure next week!
Please consider subscribing and liking my channel it would mean a lot to me to have you participate; as well as, if you’d like to be on the show send me a email:
This has been the most challenging week of my life! Normally we shoot no more than two productions in a week; however, Monday was a double shoot, Tuesday and Thursday we had a shoot, and a double shoot on Saturday. We had one on Sunday but we had to reschedule. We had ran out of power both on the camera and physically! No time to recharge.
Each week I will be sharing with you all the stories that we covered over this past week but today I want to start out with Taco Tuesday.
On our adventure we had so much fun! I found out that an interview that I conducted with a television personality in 2012 for a cinematography project I would also be now working with him once again. I will have the link below of the interview in my younger years! I sent him a message and asked if it would be all right if I took some behind the scenes footage of the Taco eating throw down that he was going to be in for the Capital City Taco Mafia group. And I was fortunate enough that he excepted my request! It was such an amazing adventure to hang out with the Taco Mafia boss and a world champion taco junky.
The Taco Mafia group in Sacramento is an important asset to our local community as well as Huntington Beach and soon to open in Hawaii and Las Vegas. It’s been a great pleasure to watch the group grow so fast and large; as well as, I have had the honor in covering a documentary in regards to what the group has done for our community. The network group members have had mergers, weddings , homes bought, and automobile transactions.
I hope you enjoy this fun packed video and I look forward to bringing you the next adventure next week!
Please consider subscribing and liking my channel it would mean a lot to me to have you participate; as well as, if you’d like to be on the show send me a email:
This week on Ability Awareness Through My Lens the holiday launch has arrived for 2019! As we know after Black Friday the days seems to speed up with holiday cheer everywhere we go! Our first adventure starts with our annual Member Appreciation shindig! It was such a fun event with the food and the atmosphere and of course the amazing staff from Access Sacramento! Please enjoy the fun video slideshow with our adventures!
Our second adventure was buying a new camera to capture all our field productions. Here is our review of the Canon VIXIA HF G50:
Overall, this is not your regular run of the mill camcorder. It is packed with all sorts of features and has the capacity of making professional documentaries if not more. We are going to keep playing with it and deliver any new information as we discover. I feel there is so much more to it than what we have described below. Most importantly we feel it ís pretty intuitive for a basic user. For any extra settings I suggest reading the user manual closely to learn about so many possibilities this camcorder offers.
1. Fairly easy to use. It does not have too many buttons on the outside, most controls are placed on 3î LCD touchscreen. You can go through settings with touch panel or the joystick located on the outside of the camera body. Yes, there is a mini joystick, left-right-up-down and set button in the middle for those who do not wish to look away. It also has five customizable buttons you can assign to your favorite features so you don’t have to browse through settings. There is a 0.24-inch TILTABLE electronic viewfinder. You can tilt up to 45 degrees for your comfort. Touchscreen is made from 460,000 pixels and looks AMAZING. I also found it to be pretty intuitive comparing to my old Sony camcorder. It has presets and several special scene modes to choose from for different occasions like sports, low light shooting and more. I still did not get to use them all but definitely appreciate the low light one. If you are a basic user these presets modes are PERFECT to work with until you get to figure out all possibilities of the Canon Vixia G50 has to offer.
2. The camcorder measures 8.4 x 4.3 x 3.6 inches, and weighs 2.1lbs (main body only) which is pretty lightweight to carry around even for longer periods of time.
3. It has options of both slow-motion and fast-motion recording in 4K and full HD! I am personally more impressed by slow-motion, This camcorder makes me feel very creative and I am already thinking about videos. For those more tech savy: Slow motion recording up to 60fps in Full HD but 30 fps in 4K UHD.
4. Optical zoom lens 20x. It allows you to keep 4K quality for the entire zoom range. You can be using optical zoom between 1x-20x, its all Ultra HD. This means image quality stays equally good. No more zooming in but having to compensate the shot quality.
5. Face detection autofocus! You can also manually select desired focus area on the touch screen.
6. It has 2 SD card slots to store recordings . That ís plenty of memory to be creative, make sure to bring extra battery pack. It is possible to simultaneously record on both SD cards, if desired to have backup of your shooting or you can choose relay recording which allows for interrupted recording from one card to another when the first card gets maxed out on memory. Files are recorded in MP4 format. SD cards are not included but I suggest getting the highest capacity you can find.
7. HDMI port. This Camcorder can output HDMI while recording, meaning you could simultaneously record and have your recording play on an external monitor. It also has a USB port, mic input, and headphone jack.
8. Battery life is 2hrs of continuous recording when using all the features and up to 3hrs on low power settings. Battery Pack BP-820 is included, I will probably get extra batteries for all day events.
9. It is compatible with lots of extra cool accessories from Canon. One being advertised is RC-V100 Remote Controller which allows user to set adjustments and operate the camcorder from distance.
In summary great camcorder. I feel this is something that could last a lifetime to a basic user. You can literally jog and shoot and still have great footage. At the same time I also feel that if not used in its full capacity spending this kind of money would be a waste.
Our team had the pleasure of visiting the amazing African Origins boutique located in Elk Grove California. It was such a pleasure to see such amazing artisans crafts in one location! Their products come from various countries in Africa. They carry a wide variety of products ranging from clothing, artwork, and healthy beauty supplies; as well as, in house braiding providing quality braiding techniques. Owner Marion Allie gives you an amazing tour explaining each product and its origin! There was gorgeous handmade jewelry made from animal and fish bones! Myself being a huge believer in recycling and up cycling. Marion shop had me in high spirits that other people on the other side of our planet believe in the same cause. If you want an amazing experience and feel as if you have traveled to a boutique in Africa this indeed is the place for you! They have wine too!
For the second part of the day our team had the pleasure of having retired Military Veteran/Writer Alton E. Pete in studio. “Alton Pete has demonstrated and learned how to be a selfless leader. To lead by example, use those creative ideas to make an impact on the community and this entire world.” Collectively, we all are God’s people and we can make a positive change to help revitalize someone’s life. Alton Pete has decided five years ago to do just that by taking a Leap of Faith along with some Courage by starting a movement from his creative thinking, writing an amazing book and now on his way to launching his Brand “Life is so Precious.”
Now for our bonus video I have included a on wheels recording studio. I hope you enjoy the video and learn how you can book your very own private studio session!
This week on Ability Awareness Through My Lens our team had the opportunity to explore the performance hall at Tim’s Music which hosts many events throughout the year, including clinics and classes, recitals, performances, and meetings and can be booked for your next private event! With a genuine greeting they are prepared to assist you in your musical journey.
We had an amazing conversation with the co-owner Scott here is what we learned:
Let’s start with the basics. What is music? At its core, all music is is just different forms of rhythmic structure and pitch variant. When we begin learning how to play an instrument, we start a type of training that is a multi-sensory motor experience. Playing an instrument requires skills that include reading a complex symbolic system (sheet music), and translating that system into a motor activity that is heavily dependent on multi-sensory feedback. Musicians are also required to develop fine motor skills, memorize long musical passages, and improvise within given musical parameters. Music sight-reading calls for the simultaneous and sequential processing of a vast amount of information in a very brief time for immediate use. This kind of task requires the interpretation of pitch variant (what note you play) and rhythmic structure (how long you play that note). As you can gather, there is an immense amount of cognitive functions required to play music. This increased amount of neural activity in turn promotes myelination. Myelination is the process of coating the axon of each neuron with a fatty coating (called myelin), which protects the neuron and helps it conduct signals more efficiently. Check out this quick explanation of how music affects myelination:
To put it simply, people who listen to and play a lot of music have enhanced reading and literacy skills, reasoning, and mathematical abilities. Learning to play a musical instrument is one of the best things you can do for your brain at any age. Adolescent-centered studies show that even very basic rhythm abilities, such as tapping to a beat, relate with reading skills, and there is initial evidence for how both abilities may rely on common underlying neural mechanisms of sound processing. Playing an instrument as a kid leads to a sharper mind in old age, according to a new study conducted by Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, a clinical neuropsychologist in Emory’s Department of neurology, and her colleagues. The researchers gave 70 people between the ages of 60 and 83 a battery of tests to measure memory and other cognitive abilities. The researchers found that those who had played an instrument for a decade or longer scored significantly higher on the tests than those with no musical background. Studies have also demonstrated that music enhances the memory of Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, including a study conducted at UC Irvine, which showed that scores on memory tests of Alzheimer’s patients improved when they listened to classical music. The effects of learning an instrument are powerful, and will last a lifetime.
Stay tuned for next weeks Vlog for another amazing journey!!
We are excited to share this weeks adventures. Tiffany G was in the house marking our three year journey with our team! TimeGlass Works brought their expert skills to create an epic episode to air on television.
Paul Yang was our director of photography as well as Cinematographer’s Amy Lo and Yaj Tue who brought out there powerful gear to create epic content. It was an honor to work with these well seasoned photographers.
Aldo Cocco shared his life with us and how his journey has landed him on some amazing and famous movie sets as a composer. It was an honor to have him in the studio. We are pleased to announce that we have created the first session of his Rockumentary on his life of his amazing work.
Inna Beethoven joined us for an exclusive regarding her epic journey as a musician starting from the age of five. She brought the band she performs with to play some great tunes. I hope you enjoy the energy and amazing experience we had with both guests in the house. It was a great honor to spend time with all these talented people with the same desires as ours. I hope you enjoy the behind the scenes pictures taken to show what is coming up in episodes for the future. We look forward to sharing the lives of these two people. Please contact us if you’re interested in being on the show or know somebody that you would like to be featured on our show. We would love to speak to them and share their talents as they deserve.
Ability Awareness Through My Lens 