Our video is #1 on the NME Buzz.
Somehow we have ended up being written about in the NME every week this month! We’re buzzzzzing :-)
Watch the video here if you’ve not seen it!
Somehow we have ended up being written about in the NME every week this month! We’re buzzzzzing :-)
Watch the video here if you’ve not seen it!
This is the video that I made for Echo Lake, that was somewhat famously shot on the Microsoft Kinect. The band were recorded separately by the Kinect plugged into a MacBook Pro. the laptop was running a piece of custom software written in Cinder by my friend and colleague Dom Jones that wrote out the depth and RGB images to separate ‘TIFF stacks’. Once we’d shot the footage I began to build on the work of Flight 404 (who wrote the original Kinect drivers for Cinder) to manipulate the images into one ‘world’.
Without getting too far into the tech of the whole thing, that was pretty much how it was made.
The video went through one slight revision (hence v1.1) before going live on Gorilla Vs. Bear and Altered Zones simultaneously. I’ll cover that revision and a whole bunch of other stuff in a future ‘making of…’. In a piece of bad timing I then went on a shoot in Cambridgeshire where internet was extremely intermittent while an awful lot of people started watching the video and passing it round. Which is what you always hope (and in this case plan) will happen but to see it in action was a little surreal. More on the ‘viral’ nature (with stats!) in another post.
This is a video I shot for Peepholes a band I’ve know for quite a while and the second band we’ve put out on Hungry For Power Records.
This was shot on my Canon 7D in about 45 minutes in a converted public toilet in the centre of Brighton. We had exactly 2 hours in the space (it’s a rehearsal room) but due to a battery charging I was a bit late getting in there. The band had previously scoped out a (very) old dentist’s light which helpfully was on wheels. After about an hour of moving equipment around in the cramped space and getting the dentist’s light into position we started filming. After setting up an iPhone to loop the track Nick and Kat valiantly played Ladder over and over while I moved around the space getting as many angles as we had time for.
After transcoding the H.264 footage to Prores it took a couple of days editing to get it into shape with another day finessing and grading.
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.