Video backdrop series, part 10: Closing thoughts

I put together a total of nine videos for the concert backdrop. For the tenth one, the band used the exceptional "Night Chorus" music video directed by Matt Walla. You may have read some praise from me about it right here. How fun was it to see the band playing in front of images of themselves from the music video? Very fun. The video was perfect. The energy in the room was perfect. The night as a whole was perfect. And I'm not just glorifying the past. I knew this would be a night to remember while it was happening.

Since the tenth video wasn't my own, I was originally going to use this final installment of my blog series to show some clips from my footage that didn't "make the cut" for one reason or another, as there is a substantial amount of it. However, I find myself wanting to wrap up the series sooner rather than later, so pardon me if I take some short cuts here. Instead of clips, I'm going to give you some stills.

One idea that didn't find a home was a series of nature shots I took at various locations over the course of the shoot. Each contained some subtle movement (e.g. a leaf dangling from a cobweb, ripples in a stream, bugs swarming around branches, a fading sun), but it may have been too subtle to work as a backdrop. We needed exaggerated motion and contrast in order for it to be picked up by the projector and remain recognizable behind layers of stage lights. Not only were these images a little dull, they were also too literal. It felt more like stock nature footage you see between segments on PBS than an accompaniment to a rock show. See for yourself:

Then there were some alternate shots -- for backdrops that did get made -- that just weren't needed in the final edits (or were, again, too literal). These probably don't mean a lot to you because you haven't seen every shot that I did use, but here's a little sampling of my B-roll below anyway. (A little trivia: the hand in the first one belongs to R and was meant to be her cameo as she "pulls back the curtain" between the sidewalk and the trail in "Waking World," but, alas, it was too cheesy to include.)

I also have a few unused time-lapses that I'm not going to post yet. These are just some experiments that will likely make an appearance in some future, unrelated entry on this blog. They need a little more distance from this project and the right choice of music before they will be ready for viewing.

That about wraps things up then. It was a lot of work to document all of this, let alone create the backdrop videos themselves, but now that it's done I'm really glad I have a written and visual record of the project. Maybe "work" is the wrong word because I had so much fun stretching myself creatively (and technically, for that matter) to stitch together this quilt of abstract images for the concert. (Hmmmm... Why didn't I call this "The Quilt Project" instead of the "The Sweater Project"? That makes much more sense.)

Finally, I'd like to thank ThreadSpinner one more time for giving me this opportunity and so much freedom to build my own artistic endeavor on top of theirs. They took a huge risk by asking me to help shape their image at one of their most important concerts to date. There were times when I wasn't sure I'd be able to pull it off, but I've come to the other side with more confidence in my vision and a huge sense of satisfaction. The band makes for an imagination-spinning muse, one I'd like to work with again in the future.

Minneapolis is my flash-sideways

Great photo by R, eh? It was taken on Figueroa Mountain on my 31st birthday. It's sort of a companion piece to the one in this post.

I'm in Minneapolis for work this week and have a few minutes for a quick entry from my hotel room, so let's do this. And let's do it without over thinking it.

I've been feeling a little out-of-touch with you lately, and there's a complicated answer for that. Life in general has been feeling more complicated than usual lately. It's complicated. It's a Meryl Streep movie. Yawn.

It feels like my brain is degrading.

It's more difficult to connect with people than ever before. For some reason I thought it would get easier.

I recently reopened my private, written journal, but after one marathon session it has been largely neglected as well.

I'm still thinking in terms of 140 max characters. I blame Twitter. So much for writing that novel.

I want to be here and there and nowhere.

This is what I get for starting a blog entry without much of a point. I'm all over the place tonight. Let's forget this ever happened.

But first, view this beautiful woman, partially shrouded by wildflowers:

Two-year-old in town

Because the wee one is not smiling in that photo, let me post one more...

...that's better.

The folks pictured above were our guests during the last week. That would be R's mom, sister, and our little nephew.

The boy is a handful! He requires constant attention and brings a ruckus with him wherever he goes, but as far as I understand, that's pretty normal for a two-year-old, so I'll let it pass :-) He's a sweet kid. We don't get to see him terribly often, and each time we do, he appears to have taken a leap forward in development. Now he's forming sentences and running so fast we can hardly keep up with him. Check out the footage below from a walk around the block to see him in action. He's a ball of energy.


Having guests is a good excuse to carry a camera when we go out and about, so I took a bunch of photos. A few of my favorites have been added to the second half of this gallery. Check them out because I'm counting on them showing you some of what we did and where we went. (This is my way of getting out of writing a full recap.)

It was good to see the in-laws. We're not used to being on the hosting side of a visit, so I hope we did okay. I was probably too distracted by work, as usual, and probably didn't make the most out of our time together, but I'm really glad they came and were able to enjoy Santa Barbara. I know R appreciated having some of her closest peeps around too.

I'll leave you with one more shot of little Ezra. What do you think... is the SoCal lifestyle going to his head?

Video backdrop series, part 9: "Darkness"

I have to admit this 10-part series is going on a little too long even for me. I'm looking forward to finishing it up so I can return to your regularly scheduled programming. But I can't quit this close to the end. We have two entries left. Bear with me.

The circumstances for this particular video were a little bit different from the rest. ThreadSpinner played "Darkness" during their encore, and that's a distinction right there because, at least in my opinion, an encore is a chance to experiment -- or play something unexpected and less rehearsed -- without necessarily reflecting poorly on the main set or the show as a whole if it's not perfectly executed. The band pulled out all the stops by playing a song that nobody in the audience had heard before. Not only was the song unreleased and unrecorded, but it was still being developed. I don't think the lyrics were even finalized at that point.

Yet the song and its performance ended up being one of the highlights of an already exceptional concert. It was epic and complex and came off a little bit looser than the other tunes, allowing for the band to really get into the music and feel their way through it. From my perspective, the music appeared to be driving them, rather than the other way around. I enjoy witnessing a band become bigger than a sum of its parts like that.

So how do you create a video backdrop for a song you haven't heard? Well, I was given a description of it as well as a backing track with drums and some effects added on. I didn't get the full picture of the song until I heard it performed at the sound check the day of the show, but I had heard enough to get the right pace, tone, and running time. There were some guesses involved too, and I was sure curious to see my results would fit with the music as well as I hoped.

One of the concepts I had been throwing around (for another song actually) was to shoot food coloring being dropped into water. It's a neat effect, but it's not a completely original idea. If you go to Vimeo.com you can probably find all kinds of examples of camera experiments like this. Shooting food coloring is sort of a rite of passage for videographers. I wanted to give it a shot too, but I wasn't sure if I wanted the results presented along side the rest of my backdrop videos, which were, at least to my knowledge, more original creations.

It was the weekend before the CD release party -- the band was finalizing the order of their set and rehearsing with the videos I had already delivered -- when I decided to go ahead and make this one last backdrop. The show just would have felt incomplete if the encore didn't have a visual to go along with it. This was a simple concept that I could shoot in my own home. And really, the look of the food coloring seemed a perfect fit for this psychedelic song.

My set-up was a glass pitcher filled with water, a white sheet of paper behind it, every directional light I had pointed at it, and my camera zoomed in just enough to cut out all of the "glare spots" caused by the lights and edges of the pitcher. I ended up setting up the shoot four or five times over the course of the weekend because little imperfections (reflections in the glass, out-of-focus food coloring) kept appearing after I imported the footage on my computer.

I probably ended up with an hour's worth of me dropping coloring into the pitcher and about five minutes of it that I could actually use. But those five minutes were pretty cool. I was able to alter the colors in my editing software and reverse the direction of the fluid movement to make it look like the coloring was being removed at times. I ended up being really happy with the results. And it's funny because I don't think any of those imperfections I was worried about would have been noticeable on the screen during the show anyway. The projector didn't show that much detail. Oh well.

I'm not going to post a clip from the concert this time. First, I really messed up the audio on this one. It wouldn't do the performance justice (hear it for youself at one of the band's live shows instead). Plus, my second camera ran out of tape by this point in the show. Lastly, since this is an unreleased song I'm not sure if the band wants clips of it online yet. So you're only getting the two stills below. Eventually, I'd like to use the footage for another short experimental video à la the Moonrise or Silence blips I already posted. It's on my list.

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!