
HOW MY BURNING MAN VIDEOS BECAME MY MOST POPULAR VIDEOS IN YEARS
BURNING MAN - BLACK ROCK CITY
MY BURNING MAN X PLAYGROUND 2024 VIDEO
Last year at Burning Man marked my second time filming the event and camping with Camp Playground. With the experience from my first year, I took this opportunity seriously. I was determined to bring my absolute best gear—my Canon R5C, Mavic 3 Pro, GoPro 10, a solid tripod, and an E-bike to get around. I filmed the entire build and spent over two weeks on the Playa, dealing with dust storms far worse than my first year. But I didn’t let that stop me. I pushed my production to its limits because I truly believed in what I was creating. Burning Man was going to be the most insane event I could ever try to capture.
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Having been in the festival filmmaking industry for over 10 years, making a living from it, nothing prepared me for the unique challenges of Burning Man. The dust, the grit—it destroys everything. My tripod doesn’t even open the same anymore from the playa dust. But still, I risked everything I owned to make this video, and honestly? I’m proud of the result. It performed better on Instagram this time, and even though the gear took a beating, it was worth it.
I WENT TO BURNINGMAN AND LEFT WITH SOME OF MY BEST IMAGES EVER
BURNING MAN X PLAYGROUND 2023
My first year filming Burning Man and camping with Camp Playground was an adventure I’ll never forget. Luckily, I have some friends who design and build the Playground camp, so I’d been bugging them for years about joining. I promised I’d come early, help build the camp, film the whole process, and stay until the last day to clean up. It turned out to be an incredibly epic experience. There’s something uniquely rewarding about creating a space with your friends that becomes one of the coolest spots at Burning Man for people to enjoy. If you’re just attending the event without helping, you’ll never really understand it. You have to get your hands dirty to feel it.
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That year was the one with the rain and mud, and of course, the news spun the whole thing like it was a disaster. But for me, it was a dream. It was my first video, and I shot it with a RED Raven Cinema camera as my main body and a GoPro—that’s it. I was genuinely nervous about going to Burning Man, which sounds crazy because I had been traveling the world shooting events all year. But there was something about this event that had me anxious.
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The first year was pure magic, though. No pressure, no money involved, no expectations—just pure creativity. It was the perfect blank canvas. And to my surprise, this video ended up getting 1.7 million views on YouTube. No ads, no big fancy account—just my personal one that had been dormant for 10 years. It became my most successful video to date, and I couldn’t be prouder of how it turned out