Video backdrop series, part 8: "Waking World"

While this is not necessarily my favorite video from the backdrop series, "Waking World" is probably my favorite song from ThreadSpinner's new EP. My head was flooded with images the first time I heard it, and that is essentially how I define a good song. It takes more effort to NOT create a video for something like this.

If you haven't done so yet, go and download ThreadSpinner's EP (details at the band's website). It's inexpensive, well-produced, and full of gripping, inspiring tunes. This video project would have been a lot more difficult if I hadn't liked the music so much.

Because there wasn't much struggle in the idea phase for this one, and because the motif I had in mind seemed to match up okay with Sarah's suggested themes, this was the very first backdrop video I shot. Here's an excerpt from an email I sent the band describing the concept:

"I want to walk down State Street at night and then speed up the footage, maybe add some motion blur. I'll also walk on a trail in the woods under sunlight and give it the same sped-up treatment... and sort of blend them together, dissolving back and forth. It might look a little repetitive, but the frantic forward movement will suggest the kind of searching you describe, without distracting the audience from the music too much. When I'm on State, maybe I keep going all the way to the end of the wharf and end with a shot of the vast ocean. In other words, what we find at the end of the 'search' is a dark, blank canvas of possibility..."

I burned quite a few calories hoofing about six miles total with my camera pointed in front of me. Some of the walking footage was sped up to 1500% in post-production, so I needed a lot of it to cover a four and a half minute song.

The original cut was relentlessly fast-paced, but I ended up making some changes after hearing a live recording of the song and discussing it with the guitarist, Jon. The energy and tempo were slightly different in the live version; there was more "build." That was one thing I had to watch out for -- the songs would not be performed exactly as they were recorded. Jon eventually gave me some bootlegs from a practice session, and I worked on timing everything to them instead of the ones from the EP.

The revised video starts with an almost drunken, blurry-eyed stumble through a riverbed and gradually speeds up into a tear through town. In post-production I added the black, feathered border, giving the video a kind of tunnel vision, which was meant to tie into the lyrics about "tunneling through earthen promises." Near the end, the video turns into a big, chaotic blur before finding some peace in the darkness off a pier. It was another case where I had to loosen up on the editing and just let it flow.

Here's a quick look at the concert performance. This clip is from before things get really out-of-control. I was working on another clip from later in song, but the pieces weren't quite fitting together, so this will have to do.

Valentine wine

R and I drove north to Sonoma Valley last weekend to spend a few days away from our regular lives; to see some more of this beautiful state; to indulge on some excellent food and wine; and to celebrate Valentine's Day, just the two of us. Maybe it was foolish to drive seven hours to get to a wine region when there's a fantastic one right here in Santa Barbara County, but on the other hand it was time to pay our respects to the birthplace of the California wine industry and see what all the fuss is about. Needless to say, this trip helped deepen our immersion into oenological snobbery. It was also great fun.

"Silence" blip

I mentioned a few entries ago that one of my backdrop videos didn't feel right for the project and had to be heavily blurred into abstraction before it was usable in the concert. Well, last night in a fit of inspiration, I took the original video, chopped it up, played two minutes of an industrial sounding Portishead tune over it, and severed its ties to the backdrop project. I think it works better this way. There's a lovely sense of dread looming over the otherwise festive dancing event. Perhaps ThreadSpinner's song was too hopeful and happy; I needed one with more emotional contrast to the images, as counterintuitive as that may seem.

This is really just a scribble. It was fun to take a break between bigger projects -- namely the backdrop collection (which was so huge I'm still blogging about it) and E&B's wedding video (which has been impeded with one false start after another so far) -- to put something together quickly with no real purpose. I like working on videos the most when there is no outside pressure, when I'm just doing it for myself. I hope to add a few more of these to the mix in the coming months.

Video backdrop series, part 7: "Running Away"

Sorry if that last post was a little long for the Twitter era. I'll try to keep this one under control.

The concept for this backdrop is similar to the one for "Liar's Chair" in that it is an abstract visual design made up of four or five distinct pieces, none of which are really related to each other. For some reason this one had a way of collecting the ideas I had that just didn't seem to fit anywhere else.

I floated a flashlight in the kitchen sink, hopped a fence to shoot in a park after hours, and manipulated various sources of light (e.g. Christmas lights, the sun) to get some pretty random results that sort of inappropriately suggest "running away" considering the lyric used is actually "I'm NOT running away." Whoops.

The version we ended up using was essentially a first cut. I had intended to circle back to it and try to fuse the separate pieces together better, but the band seemed satisfied by what I already showed them and I was up against a deadline, so the revision never happened.

What's really surprising, especially after me telling you how this one should have failed, is that it worked really well. This was the penultimate song in the main set -- near the climax of the concert, if not the climax itself -- so it had to work. When it did, it was one of the best moments in a night full of great moments.

This may be the only entry in the series in which I post a complete song. My recording of it is not solid all the way through, but I liked one section near the beginning and one near the end, so I figured this is easier than posting two separate videos. Plus, posting stills doesn't really work for this one; you need to see it in motion.


I cheated a little bit in my editing: two shots from the video are actually from the sound check, rather than the actual concert. How else was I going to get a close up of fingers on a keyboard?

Final thought: The guitar part in this song rules!

Video backdrop series, part 6: "The Unmaking"

When I first started discussing this project with the band, Sarah (the lead singer/songwriter) listed some images and feelings she associates with a few of the songs. Most of what she told me was open to interpretation, and I probably didn't come anywhere near close to recreating what she envisioned, but it was still helpful to get inside her head a little.

One song that she did not give me any thoughts on is "The Unmaking." I was kind of relieved because this is one of their older tunes that I had listened to a bunch, and I already had something in mind for it. For some reason this song screamed science fiction at me. Maybe the backing synths sound kind of like a UFO landing or something -- I didn't over-analyze it. I just knew that was the direction I wanted to take this particular backdrop.

Okay, now jump back ten years. I was in college, taking a summer course in Barcelona. A few classmates and I went out with some locals to a hole-in-the-wall club down some dark alley. The entrance was unmarked and the place was about as big as our kitchen. It was stuffed with people dancing to techno music and it had episodes of the original Star Trek series projected on the wall.

I liked how the old television show was being used for a purpose for other than what was originally intended. I'm sure the episodes had a story line, but of course nobody was trying to follow it. That wasn't the point. There was a pulpiness to it -- a sense that it could go on for a really long time without attracting too much attention, just adding to the club's ambience with trippy special effects and cheesy acting. I've been in other bars since then where they play film noir on plasma screens usually reserved for sports games. They are like moving, old-time photographs on the wall. I like that kind of stuff. My backdrop video project as whole was meant to be a decoration like that... and the segment for "The Unmaking" had to be sci-fi because of Barcelona.

So what better opportunity would I have to pull out the Star Trek influenced Super 8 film that my uncle made with some of his friends in the late 1970s? Growing up, my brothers and I referred to this piece of work as "Uncle Jimmy's Space Movie." My dad would set up the old screen and projector once in a while and treat us to a showing of it and a few others my uncle made. They were a huge inspiration at the time and planted a desire for filmmaking in me.

When my dad eventually bought a video camera, two things happened: (1) I started making my own movies, and (2) we transferred our collection of 8mm films to tape. Then, sometime post-college, I went through the VHS tapes and digitized some of the contents in order to further preserve them. This included the space movie as well as the "Mud Brothers" clip I showed you last year. I really didn't have any other plans for these old films at the time, but I was happy I had them handy last August.

Part of the charm of the space movie lies in its roughness -- in the loose editing, in the decay of the original film, in the jittery projection. I didn't mind all of that, but I did make a quick pass through and edit it down a bit for the backdrop. Some of the talking scenes went on too long for a crowd who wasn't meant to follow the story. The problem with this shorter cut, however, is that I ended up with three and a half minutes of a space movie for a backdrop that needed to be five minutes long. So I had to supplement it with some of my own original footage.

After my additions were made, the backdrop was no longer about the space movie. It was now about what was happening in a room where the space movie was playing. It plays on a TV screen in the shadows, and there is a mysterious figure who crosses back and forth in front of it. Eventually we follow that figure out of the room and see where he goes. It all comes together in what I think is a satisfying conclusion, tying together the inspiration and the inspired, bridging 30+ years of a genetic bond over artistic creation... I'll shut up now.

This backdrop includes a cameo from a much younger version of my dad, seen on the "video conferencing monitor" in the movie within a movie below:

It also includes a cameo by me, in a brief sequence that attempts to match the space movie shot-by-shot:

Are you starting to see why I was nervous about showing this one to the band (not to mention a crowd of 150 concert attendees)? In the end I think it worked fine as a set decoration, yet I like that there were a few extra rewards in there for anybody who might care (i.e. me).

Finally, here's a clip. Keep in mind you're only viewing about a third of it. I might try to get a full-length version online eventually, but this better suits my needs right now. Enjoy!


P.S. A big thank you to my uncle Jim for allowing me to use his work-of-art!