Insomnia sucks. I probably have a sleepless night once a month. And in those dark, fuzzy nights I can barely do anything but stare at a computer or TV screen. My last episode happened after attending a show at the Slowdown. The bands were all great but my shooting was way off. And I returned home kinda bummed in my effort. After spending a good hour tossing in bed, I got up and determined to spend the night editing something out of this jumbled mess. I had spent a few minutes between bands shooting the Galaga/Pacman/Donkey Kong arcade games that no one played in the corner. I loved the falling “indie bubbles” from the Galaga screen and the refresh rate/shutter difference that making a flashy ending to the video. After putting together montages of each band I experimented with adding the video game elements on top of the montages and settled on a screen composite layer. It didn’t really change the look of the montage but added the video game footage and also infused the texture of the super grainy footage into the clean indie bubbles. Normally, I’m a very clean editor, trying my best to make it look as natural as possible and being the “invisible hand”. But in my insomniac stupor, I wanted to screw things up. So I pitchbent the video game audio, chopped it up and repeated it, repeated the game over shot at the end, mirrored-flipped-flopped-slowed-distorted the indie bubbles, and made sure none of my montage shots looked like they synced with the music. It came together rather quick. And instead of taking a step back and doing an edit after some sleep. I finalized it and uploaded to youtube. I think now that I would have tried to cut out a minute of footage, but I’m still mesmerized by it. So what do you all think?

Bands:

Thunder Power

Bear Country

Joan of Arc

Been Reading:

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

Cut by Cut by Gael Chandler

Rather suprised how I didn’t get distracted by the noise. Good audio makes it worthwhile, which was a mix of board feed and stereo room audio recorded on a Zooom H4N in 4CH mode. I did up the mids, brights, and a little saturation. Overall I’m pretty impressed. What do you think?

A web friend and band publicist, Patrice Fehlen from September Gurl, talked to me awhile ago about shooting a video for the elegant Eliza Blue. I checked out her website and saw these opulent promo pics and then heard her polished cinematic album and worried Patrice might not have called the right guy. I mentioned to Eliza before we met up that I wanted to add a bit more rough edges to her persona and she easily agreed. What was most important to me was to bring a live feel to the video. So many videos are just a band playing a song in park, or train station or old building but I wanted to still stretch from this played out motif and add back in some music video elements in a short time period.

I brought Dan Welk along again and we met up in an old warehouse where I used to work. We attempted to get to the roof but it actually was rather boring (and I might add dangerous) and we crawled back down to the top floor. There we saw this odd door frame leaning up next to a window and I just thought that was great. We found a few chairs and we’re ready.

Again I was operating my T2i with Dan’s 70-200mm 4.0 and Dan used a 18-70 on his 5D2. We had a hidden wireless on Eliza and a second mic pointed at the percussionist off the frame. Both plugged into a H4N. We ended up recording the song three times getting six different angles. I originally thought I would only use one take to edit to but eliza played each so well and all the angles worked well to mix into. Since we still had some time we walked down to some train tracks by the river and  starting shooting for the hell of it. I didn’t know if anything we shot would make sense but I was excited to get some fun shots and just maybe it would make its way in. Luckily we had the hour of power in our favor and we quickly came up with a list of shots and got them fairly quickly and easily.

In the edit, I synced the live shots with Pluraleyes and got some film burns loaded. The edit came easily and it almost seemed like there was a little story in the music video elements. Enough to seem coherent, but lots of mystery and hopefully not too pretentious. Really loving this camera, can’t wait to get some nice glass on it and see it really shine. Let me know what you think.

This is my start into the DSLR revolution. I recently acquired a Canon T2i and wanted to try it out. I called up by friend Dan Welk who has a Canon 5D mark ii and we headed to the PCC album release show. Both cameras have amazing depth of field, rich color, and low contrast settings, which all evoke a film feel. I’ve been following the DSLR movement religiously but have only recently been able to dive in. And dive I will. Look for lots more footage up here soon as well as all the content I have planned for the site. Got lots of shoots planned in the next few months so I’m excited to use this little guy.

Tech: This was shot with a 5D2 and T2i. The 5D2 had a Rode video mic on it. The audio is a mix of a board feed recorded on a Zooom H4N and a bit of the 5D camera audio. The three sources (2 video + 1 audio) were synced by Pluraleyes (which tried real hard) and edited in FCP with minor color correction. My T2i struggled a bit in the low light so I bumped up the mids in post a bit and desaturated it. The T2i image has quite a bit less latitude in it compared to the 5D2. There is a bit of distortion from the board at the beginning and the crowd had no inhibitions about bumping into us so it gets jumpy from time to time. This was a great test of these new cameras.

Linkage:

Dan Welk

Canon T2i

Poison Control Center

Pluraleyes