Dan Nixon

La La Vasquez and the 7D [geek post]

New 7D + great Brighton show at the Cowley Club put on by the dudes at Sex is Disgusting = a couple of interesting videos. Well interesting for me as I experiment with different lenses, methods of shooting bands and audio issues.

The first video is of La La Vasquez and was shot with a 50mm f1.8 lens which crucially didn’t have any image stabilisation. Which in some ways made my usual floaty style far more difficult to achieve but did allow for a far lower ISO setting than a zoom would have. The lighting in the room was very low key so I was grateful for the extra stops.

The audio was a mix of a uncompressed recording from the board (which only contained the vocal and kick drum) and the sound from the camera. Unfortunately the 7D doesn’t (at present) allow you to set a level for audio recording so it’s all automatic meaning it clips like crazy and pulses during loud/quiet transitions. Using the sound board feed does paper over that quite well but it leaves the vocal a little high.

Manually focussing between the band proved a bit tricky with the awkwardly placed viewfinder but once I got back into the 16mm-manual-focus-at-film-school swing of things it got easier.

I think though, despite the benefits of the fast lens, the 50mm without Image Stabilisation is only really going to come out when I’m on a tripod.

Final note: none of this footage is graded. I had a quick play but the H.264 at the settings I’m currently using doesn’t give me a lot to work with. Other settings might help or not. We’ll see.

13 Monsters NYE animation

“Amazing video by Dan Nixon (actually, check out everything the lad has done - all fine fine work) for the Cold Pumas.”

— 88 Days in my Veins

“Cold Pumas, a UK group with heavy emphasis on structural sounds, take a van to a show, where they play. There’s no audience, adoring or otherwise. They work it out just fine, a lot of grunts and hard face squints, but there’s no mystery. Maybe this is a PSA to younger bands—for the most part, the glory is your own.”

— The Fader [is ‘no mystery’ a good thing?]

Cold Pumas - Jela

This is the video for Cold Pumas’ Jela, the first release on Hungry For Power records, the label I run.

I travelled with the band when they played at the Offset Festival in September, filming it all on a Sony EX1.

Back in the summer I’d written a bit of software that takes sound and video files as inputs and then manipulates the order of the video frames in relation to the amplitude of the sound. Or, to put it another way, the image jumps forward every time the kick drum’s hit. I showed a demo of this to the band when we were first talking about putting a record out and they really liked the idea. So this became integral to the video.

It still needed a framing device and a sense of progression so they suggested I accompany them to the festival. From there the idea emerged of a DIY Range Life prior to the synesthesia of their performance. Which is pretty much what happens.

I’ll go into more detail about the techniques used in another post…

A frame export from Apple Color while I play with the grade for the Jela video. Classic desaturated bloom effect on the highlights. Probably not where I’m going with this but the light looked nice.

Stills from the Cold Pumas video

Cold Pumas - Jela (trailer)

A shot from the Jela footage set to the first minute or so of the track. I stuck this together to promote the launch of the single on 5th October.

The video was shot on the lovely Sony EX1 at the equally lovely Offset Festival in Essex. After shooting the day before for a different project I travelled to the festival with the band in the morning and then had to rush back to Brighton afterwards to play at 13monsters that night. Pretty exhausting weekend all in.

YES WAY trailer

My Yes Way festival film screened as part of the Seripop exhibition at Newcastle’s Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art at the beginning of August. It was a shorter one hour edit of the film featuring 22 bands.

Dummy magazine gave it a rather nice review here.

“this is clean, clear and for the most part brilliantly executed. With no concessions to pointless pans-around-the crowd or other such nonsense…it’s fixed on the stage, focused on the feel of being an audience member. Perhaps it would be a cliché to say ‘it makes you feel like you were there’…but it really, realy does.”