New music video from Mitch Gettman directed and edited by yours truly. Check it out here: http://hearnebraska.org/content/stay-me-gettman-music-video

If you’re like me, you might have heard of Mitch before. At 15, Mitch started posting videos on his youtube account of acoustic versions of some of his influences like Radiohead, Jeff Buckley and U2. With view counts in the hundreds of thousands, he found an audience online. His reception helped to form a band here in town and he has been playing for almost two years now. With only the acoustic songs I had seen online, I was blown away with the mature and rocking sound of his new album. Gettman has written a solid album of mad bittersweet characters yearning after love, life, and happiness. In working on this video, we mused on the album title, a Jack Kerouac quote. We wanted to project what one does when errant love runs off. We both agreed that fireworks were a centerpiece image, exploring wonder and danger, energy and contemplation. Take a moment and let the sweet release of this video set in while fireworks make your heart grow fonder.

And here is Cassie Morgan and the Lonely Pine playing “These Years” in an abandoned factory in South St. Louis.

Many more videos coming down the pipes. Check Love Drunk out for all the updates. Also like Love Drunk and HearNebraska and Ingrained on facebook.

Progressively, I’ll be posting videos here until we’re up to date.

First up is from Kyle Harvey’s Christmas in Outer Space CD Release show. Kyle is a minimalist singer/songwriter who has been talking about this idea to make an alien-themed Christmas album. This year he actually made it and put together a show with balloons and lazer lights and dancing space babes, all completely out of character for Kyle, but so awesome.

From the moment of hearing about it, I knew I wanted to shoot it. And I thought it would be fun to shoot it extra grainy and maybe in night vision. I borrowed a T2i from a friend and went down to The Barley Street Tavern. All the montage shots I grabbed before it got crowded. The alien face was actually off a book Kyle had brought and the full moon was perfect for a cold dreary night. I set up my H4N about ten feet from the main speakers and handed the second T2i to my friend Aaron Gum. Not even thinking about the danger of lazers and digital cameras we shot a number of songs, lazers passing by our cameras. Aaron’s camera especially had some unique images from the effect of the lazers, creating an almost cutout of kyle. In post, I added the green tint and vignette but the effect of the lazers is all natural. This was the perfect document of that grand night. Hope you enjoy!

Kyle Harvey’s Myspace

Find out more about Ingrained here and here

Would it be advantageous for Omaha to have a competitive relationship with a similar art scene such as Des Moines?

I’m inspired to think about this as The Des Moines Register posted an article stating just that. And having just moved back from Des Moines to Omaha, I am very conscious of the striking similarities and shared appreciation between the two cities. And they have weathered the same large socio-economic and technological tides that covered the Midwest lands. This mutual history and environment can help both cities create better and successful businesses and art together.

In the last decade, there have been a number of growing trends that has transformed the creative business landscape. One major foundation was the startup and popularity of Young Professional Groups. This group galvanized youthful leaders, entrepreneurs, and tech-saavy businessmen. This base brought enthusiasm to business in an age range that was known more for its slackerdom than anything else. Thirdly, the bank crisis erupted and the economy was going down nationally taking away trust and loyalty in large corporate structures. The economic-insulated Midwest was a great ecosystem for creative types to move to more freelance positions. Layering on top of the economy, came the social technology of twitter, foursquare, a energized facebook, and various google apps which all leveraged the social platform of smarter smartphones among others. This united both tech-saavy business types, creative freelancers, and artists. Being the social people we are, it wasn’t enough to talk tech, business, and art over twitter, and we formed entire social groups based around tweetups, barcrawls, and non-profit events. With some interactivity and instant access to coastal happenings, events, businesses, and ideas were being shared, stolen, and remixed in the Midwest.

This is the atmosphere that spurred on Barcamp, TedxLocal Talks, charity events, zombie walks, and many others. And almost in parallel during the course of this period, Omaha and Des Moines reached the same milestones: getting access to twitter and foursquare, starting coworking spaces, starting conferences and events based around the social media aficionados. The culture and spirit is so entrenched that entire journalism organizations are devoted to it and spur it on. And whether it was realized, whatever unique was starting in one city was being watched, planned, and tweaked in the other.

With such a common culture, being aware, appreciating, and having a friendly remix-style relationship with the other city is very beneficial. Whether swapping ideas, techniques, and events, our big ideas in and for our city can now affect so many others. And a friendly competitive nature wouldn’t be bad for Omaha and Des Moines.

What do I mean when I say “competitive”?

I’m not talking in terms of any type of hyping one community over another. I’m not talking that we need more art award competitions to decide what city is more artsy. I’m not even endorsing OMA vs DSM events. In fact, we do not have to be very intentional about it, just open. For I see competitive in a brother vs brother way.This is the competitive drive that moves most of us to do what we do.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be an artist, business owner, musician, filmmaker, or event organizer? I bet it was when you saw how it could be done well and how it affected people’s lives. And I bet you got into whatever it is you do for love of doing it and being around it. And I bet the more you saw others doing it and examples of it done well, it inspired a competitive desire inside of you for doing it yourself and doing it just as well. It’s that same inspiration, enthusiasm, and drive you take from Barcamp and TedxOmaha and other Omahans. And imagine that it can be taken to scale with the spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity we see bursting out from Des Moines. Let’s be honest, with half the size and population, Des Moines seems to be keeping up with The Big O.

I want to look over at Des Moines and see something new that has impact and bring that idea here, nurture it, remix it, infuse it, and push the idea behind it. This is not “I can do it better” indignation, but the complimentary merging of ideas and techniques the very foundation of our related experience came from, the internet. It is said that imitation is the highest form of flattery. So keep your eyes and ears open to the possibilities.

And truth be told this is probably already happening. I know alot of Des Moines people who attended Big Omaha and there is a busload of Omaha folks going to the Des Moines BarCamp. Awesome, keep it up. We’ve grown together so well, why not come together and see a growing benefit by being aware and friendly to our neighbors down 80.

Coming to a conference late normally sucks for you. But coming late to a BarCamp sucks for both you and the BarCamp. Because it’s really an unconference, where the attendees are really the speakers, and the topics discussed aren’t announced til that morning; making Barcamp fresh, local, and relevant. And in terms of topics, Barcamp had a three track focus of Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Technology, all interest of mine.

I’ve known about Barcamp for a few years, but this is the first one I’ve been able to attend. And by attend, I mean, stopping in at the Opening Party for 45mns and coming the next day for the last two hours after work. My only connection while not there was a real-time twitter search of #bco10.

After getting into Nomad Lounge Friday Night, I was told I would have to negotiate a free drink ticket out of the group of green shirted posse hanging by the food. Figured it was just a “Hi, I’m Andrew”, grab a ticket and hit the bar. As I made my way up to some ticket-holders I realized everyone was in deep conversation. There was no butting into a group and grabbing a ticket. So patiently I waited and finally got to talk to Johnathan Kay of @GrasshopperBuzz who has a crazy cool job maintaining and championing success stories for his company. In fact, he said his main interest was storytelling and we went off on filmmaking and storytelling and the power of social media. We both passionately emoted our desires to do cool and innovative work but that ultimately had strong impact with our clients. I totally forgot about getting my free drink. A couple other people tried to get in and get a ticket quick and were forced to wait awkwardly behind me. I’m glad it worked out that way because I probably would not met or been activated to be so social. It set the mood for passionate and energized discussion.

Now for Saturday as i worked and checked twitter, it looked like I missed some inspirational talks by RDQLUS Creative and Princess Lazertron, and a shirtless Wogsland being un-inspirational. But in the fleeting hours, I did catch a cool talk by the married duo of the New Timey Radio Hour and a impromptu talk about the stigma, benefits, and laziness of creating art in the Heartland.

First off, The New Timey Radio Hour is doing something real cool. They record new plays, radio drama style (is Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds), and create a free podcast. There are so many cool elements that are being combined here. It’s a combination of old techniques like sound effects and editing with new technology like blogging and podcasts. But all that is a vehicle for helping serving playwrights and actors. Getting that first play sold and presented in a theatre is hard. And New Timey wants to see more new plays be produced. As well this gives actors a new avenue for acting and getting in front of audiences. It’s just this great convergence of talents and goals. And it makes me wonder if there is a parallel situation in the world of film. Any thoughts?

Then, as people were packing up, there was an announcement that there was a final Creative track session. In walks @rahulgopta and his sister-in-law. I’m still not sure what the intent was in this session. The sister-in-law started by telling her life story in terms of places she has lived and done art. She described both the artistic climate of both coasts and then said that she has been in Omaha briefly and wanted to tell us all the benefits of doing art in Omaha. At this point, I was starting to get irked and that seemed to be a shared sentiment with the crowd. This woman was preaching to the choir. The Midwest has low cost of living, very friendly and collaborative, easy to travel, etc. But even with the reminder it seemed we, the audience, were being coddled as the backwoods tinkerers and rural copy-cat artists.

My mind was heating up with a million heated remarks. As I formulated by indignant response, the audience took control turning the conversation positive from what already makes Omaha a good place to do art to what we need to do to make doing art better both personally and collaboratively. One was that Midwest living allowed for more risks to be taken, so go out and push yourself and your art to a new level this year. Business-wise, the Midwest is the strongest and consistent consumer base to test and display your products. Thirdly, it was noted that the Midwest can be insulating from criticism and therefore we can have undeveloped artistic talent. I think there is another blog post or even a book involved in thinking of this issue. I think my only reservation is that I think with such a collaborative art such as film, you really have to spend some time (like years) on the coasts. I’m not talking shooting or editing. We have the tools and talents here. But to make a film successful you really need to have partnerships with distributors, theatre chains, entertainment lawyers, publicity and PR firms with a focus on film. There is so much to make something. Even turn to Lovely, Still that had major connections to wrangle the caliber of actors which leveraged financing and film fest entries. Even so, it still is going straight to DVD. Having a great film doesn’t warrant equal quality distribution and interest. Three years at SXSW will teach you something about how some producers are buying hype for some movies (read: Kickass) versus the best films that never get picked up. Ok I’ll stop being a lame filmmaker.

But really Barcamp for me was seeing the creative and entrepreneur spirit alive and well in Omaha. And through those sessions and the people I met, I came out with some encouragements.

1. We are making just as good of stuff as the coast

2. We are harder working

3.We can succeed like anyone else

4. Make your shit tighter

5. Push yourself further

6. Get more people involved

7. Make stuff Rahul would like

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?

Our documentary, Welcome to Daytrotter has a long time to go before its screening but we’re posting moments called Raw Footage that inspire us to continue filming and editing. We caught Local Natives in studio playing a catchy and cinematic song Wide Eyes. Again Dan Welk and I caught it all on Canon DSLRs and Lisa caught the sound in the room on the H4N. I synced it with Plualeyes and edited in Final Cut.  No color correction or audio sweetening. Honestly its hard to tell the difference between what we got and the recording that is posted on daytrotter here. Both are beautiful and elegant.

Keep up with the movie HERE or on facebook or twitter

Think about donating HERE
Click! Photography

Ben Godar

Lisa Edwards

This is a big announcement for me. It’s a project that has been in the works for a long time. May I introduce “Welcome to Daytrotter” a kickass documentary that I’m helping shoot and edit. Here’s the description from our website

Welcome to Daytrotter is a documentary film about the people behind the music blog and recording studio Daytrotter.  Since opening its doors in 2006, more than 1000 sessions have been recorded in the little studio in Rock Island, Il and given away for free.

The roster of artists is impressive, from Death Cab for Cutie and Spoon, to legends like Kris Kristoffersen, to many bands out on the road to make a name for themselves.  The story of how a dedicated group of people took an idea and built it into one of the most important tastemakers in indie rock is even more impressive.

This feature documentary is currently on-schedule to premiere sometime in early 2012.  It is being shot entirely in 1080p HD with Canon DSLR cameras.

Connect with us online and through social media to stay informed on the progress of the film, and please consider making a tax-deductible donation to help us tell the story.  You can also help us show there is an audience for the film by liking us on Facebook.

The last part is real important, this is a film we’ve been paying out of our pockets for. We could really use any donations and there are some sweet thank you gifts that you could recieve.

Expect to see plenty of updates on the making of the film and all the nerdy tech stuff you expect from me.