our story
our story
City Video is a brand new video production company run by two urban professional artists with combined backgrounds in dance, theater, music, film and, yes, even mime. We're into vagabonding, Korean food, and LOVE cities. Between us we've lived in Rome, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Paris, Lagos, Casablanca, London, Hamburg, and, for the past 12 years we've made the Big Apple our home. We love the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit that surrounds us in the city and the awesome constellation of unique small businesses in every borough and neighborhood, and we are dedicated to celebrating and promoting the thousands of little stories that help make this town great! With love, Nathan and Megumi
NATHAN Believe it or not - Nathan's "film school" was an intensive 5 year study of Mime in Paris and London! Learning from legend Marcel Marceau and other great physical actors taught him to think in pictures and images which naturally led on to an interest in filmmaking. For the past 18 years he's done everything from shooting big rock concerts in Lisbon to hauling camera equipment through the Sahara for an African travel series to making docs about the downtown dance scene in New York
MEGUMI was determined to become a ballerina from the age of 5. Sure enough, at 17 she was invited to join the Hamburg Ballet and spent the next decade performing all over Europe. When she moved to New York, she started incorporating multimedia into her shows, and that's when she discovered that she has a knack for shooting and editing. She loves the process of refining and polishing films in the edit suite and has no plans to stop dancing, either.
Check out this short film which tells you a little about Megumi's dance career and of course the film is made by Nathan!
Our Travelogue
For us travel and visiting new countries is a way of life. We have spent more than half of our lives living and working abroad in 4 continents. We are endlessly curious about new places and love finding ourselves in a foreign city with nothing more than a guide book and perhaps, these days, a cell phone with decent GPS! The world is endlessly hospitable and reaffirming again and again the kindness of strangers is one of the great pleasures of our lives.
Our Travelogue
For us travel and visiting new countries is a way of life. We have spent more than half of our lives living and working abroad in 4 continents. We are endlessly curious about new places and love finding ourselves in a foreign city with nothing more than a guide book and perhaps, these days, a cell phone with decent GPS! The world is endlessly hospitable and reaffirming again and again the kindness of strangers is one of the great pleasures of our lives.
We were visiting Megumi's home province, Nagano. After a night in a nearby Ryokan, we woke up early to hike up the mountain to Jigokudanai where the famous Snow Monkeys congregate and bathe around the hot springs all year. Mona was a year and a half old, Noa was 5 and Daddy was running around with a camera and couldn't get enough of these delightful dead-pan monkeys, fearlessly checking us out as we moved among them.
Fes, like Venice, is one of those cities that is singular not just for it's cultural treasures or it's food or it's population - but also for it's extraordinary layout in a space largely off-limits to motorized vehicles. It is a city that is an actual labyrinth. Normal maps are pretty much useless in this dense Moroccan metropolis. Some say you should always have a guide there or you will get hopelessly lost. But for us - though we did have a guide for part of the visit - the part that was most fun was when we WERE on our own and getting lost. As you wander through the narrow streets of the medinah, taking in all of the manifold small businesses & discreet passageways, the sounds of human and animal activity - voices, footsteps, donkeys, laborers in small tanneries and metal-working shops dominate - and you realize that this was the way the world sounded before the advent of cars and trucks and the motor-traffic rumble.
In French parlance, Pigalle is "un quartier qui bouge" - a neighborhood that moves. There is a lot going on above and below the surface here - with music, cafe culture, pornography and night life coming together in a quintessentially Parisian cocktail full of charm, tawdriness, and sexuality. The demi-monde is alive and well here, and the spirit of Toulouse Lautrec lives on along the Boulevard de Clichy.
One of the things we love about Japan is that it can be SOOOO traditional and restrained - but then you get the crazy hyper-modern technological, pop and sex obsessed side as a counter-balance. Akihabara, the electronics district of Tokyo is the epitome of this - it all comes together here: Manga, Electronics, CosPlay... Otaku Culture!!!
We were doing a series on Egypt and made several videos in the wonderul city of Cairo. Aside from the fact that Egyptians are generally very kind and hospitable - it is also one of the few Islamic destinations where non-Muslims are not only allowed inside Mosques, but able to film in them as well. Since Medieval Cairo has several of the most famous Mosques in the world this was a visual feast for us. For a lot of travel videos, we would shoot the images first and then record the narration later, this is one of the few where I ambitiously narrated the whole thing on location. Hard work, but so much fun.
We spent one day with the fabulous and indefatigable Vanessa Bernardo who marched us through Lisbon's history and it's marvelously varied neighborhoods from it's heyday as Renaissance maritime power to it's 20th century reincarnation as an art deco and fascist capital, to its reemergence as a peaceful, international and cosmopolitan destination city. Along with Barcelona, Lisbon tempted us to change our lives and move there. Watching this video brings it all back - and the temptation lives on...
We had one day to make a film about Kamakura. We'd dropped off our kids in a Tokyo daycare center and took the train south to the Izu peninsula and made our way straight to the Daibutsu. While there it started raining and I was getting pretty miserable but later when we looked at the footage we loved the textures of Kamakura on a rainy day and the parasols and umbrellas and misty overcast weather gave us some untypical images and I ended up liking the video a lot.
One of Nathan's favorite times in Egypt was spending time on Rajah's felucca as the sun set over the Nile. He was such a sincere and gentle guy - and was touched by the way he talked about the Nile, and his boat, and fishing and the advantages of taking it slow while traveling on the river. As we slipped past the big riverboat hotels and rode the wakes of the motorboats speeding past us I could imagine that he was part of a tradition that stretches back thousands of years - and that the fundamental technology, sailing, hasn't changed too much in all that time. As we parted, Rajah made us reach our hands into the river to "touch the Nile", thus ensuring that we would return one day.
We went to Barcelona just to make this video about the SagradaFamilia for about.com. We fell in love with the city and for a spell we were feverishly figuring out how we could move there, what would we do for a living? Where will the kids go to school? Barcelona seems to have all the best of Europe: a perfect early modern European architecture and layout, reminiscent of Paris BUT it also has Mediterranean beaches and the wonderful, relaxed, fun-loving Catalonians & Spaniards and, of course, Gaudi!
In Japan eating Miso soup is a breakfast tradition. Every household in Japan seems to have it's own recipe, and any supermarket will offer a vast choice of Miso quality and brands. When we visited a small Miso factory in Nagano province, we were impressed by the huge vats where the Miso slowly ferments as it ages, sometimes over several years. Like any fine food product, the process by which this rich, salty, protein-rich paste is created is complicated and fascinating. Here is a brief introduction to this elemental staple of Japanese cuisine.
The highlight of our trip to Africa was going on safari in Kenya and South Africa. We had many wonderful opportunites to film Water Buffalo, Elephants, Lions, and Rhinos and many, many other animals. Finally, in Maasai Mara, after several days, we spotted an elusive Leopard peering out at us from behind some bushes to complete the "Big Five". The footage in this video is culled from Maasai Mara & Nairobi National Park - both in Kenya, and Kruger National Park in South Africa. In Kruger, we were on our own in our own vehicle and, at times, we would come across a magnificent elephant, or lion blocking the road.
How do you limit a visit to Spain to just five must-see locations? Well you can't really, but, each of these places should be considered a starting point for further explorations: A visit to Granada's Alhambra could lead to an exploration of Andalucia and the small towns of the Sierra Nevada, like Ronda. Madrid and Barcelona have the great museums, and Gaudi respectively - but these two great Spanish cities promise unlimited opportunity for any traveler's desires and interests, cultural, culinary and otherwise. A trip up north to San Sebastian can also encompass a visit to Basque country and the Pyrenees and of course, the famous Guggenheim Bilbao. And Cordoba's Mesquita is but a landmark in a fascinating, hospitable city with a wonderful quality of life.