Ishi - Mother Prism music vid

So, I shot and edited a new music video:

Here's the story behind it:



Ishi is the creation of one of my coworkers - Brad Dale, and his friend John Mudd.

A few years back I filmed their CD release party on a whim and the video turned out very well.  In the interim they've refined the look and sound of the band, and they have a heck of a following in the DFW area.

For the release of the new CD, they asked me back.  I was a little hesitant at first because I know how much time and effort it takes to produce something that looks good, my edit rig was coming apart, and at first I felt I could only commit to shooting the footage.  Once I got the footage in place I was intrigued again though, and I couldn't resist putting an edit together.

--

The entire video was filmed on my Canon 7D through my 50mm 1.4 lens.  I went handheld 100% with zero lights.  I used the cinestyle flat color profile from Technicolor to shoot with the widest latitude since I knew it'd be a dynamic looking show.

On the day of the shoot I was given full access to backstage, the stage itself, and anywhere on the floor of the Granada theater.  My plan was to spend the time during the opening act backstage shooting the band hanging out and getting ready, and then to hit the floor and shoot the fans prepping up and getting beers.  That worked out great, and I got a number of very intimate moments from the band that ended up making the final cut.  That was also the time I got coverage of the facepainters outside as well as the exteriors and the marquee.

Once the show was underway I knew I had at least two songs that I wanted full coverage of from the perspective of John singing - Mother Prism which eventually was the one used, and Slowly But Surely.  Mother Prism was requested by Brad because he felt it would best represent the show, and Slowly But Surely for me because it was my favorite album on the new disc.

I spent a fair amount of time actually onstage with the band shooting crowd and cool moments over their shoulders, and it was here that I got some of the killer shots of Becky singing into the light and Rocky jamming on the guitar.  Brad was much more difficult to get coverage of during the show because of where he was positioned on the stage, but in the end I got just enough.

Getting the band's faces from down on the floor was much more difficult.  The crowd was standing room only and bunched into a huge knot down the middle.  My attempts to get down low and shoot up at the band generally just resulted in me getting beat up and shooting a bunch of shaky cam that I only kept very small parts of.

After the show was over, I parked by the hallway where everyone was walking out and just shot a 13 minute take of fans streaming out after the show. I got some of the really cool moments of happy people from that one shot.

By the end of it I had shot 40 gigs of coverage, used two batteries, and drank three beers.

--

The edit took a couple of weeks of on again off again work, but in the end I'm very happy with it.

Step one was to log all of the footage.  I just did this in the finder, naming all of the clips something logical and putting stars in the names of the clips that I really liked.

There were some clips that were straight away triple star clips and I knew they would be from the moment I shot them: brad popping up from behind the console during soundcheck, Rocky hugging his dad, the band having a moment before going on stage, the closeup of rocky noodling on the guitar, John's dark back walk with the lightup glasses, and a few others.

Other shots just turned into cool things through serendipity: the silhouetted girl with the butterfly wings perfectly overlapping Rocky clapping in the opening shot, the slowed down shot of Becky turning and singing, catching John playing drums on a perfect beat in a different song that I could overlay onto this one, the big blue and purple blooms that happened near the end, the perfect framing of one fan's cell phone cam on Becky dancing, etc.

The last few touches had to be manufactured a bit: the balloon popping right on the climax of the song was speed ramped into place and then had the color cranked to death at the moment it popped.  The marquee needed a focus effect to make the ISHI part stand out.  various speed ramps and shifts were done throughout to make things hit the beat that were filmed during other songs that night.

--

I edited entirely in Adobe Premiere CS6, and it was my first experience with it - having come from Final Cut 7.

The transition was seamless and very intuitive, and I really enjoyed just drawing opacities across the clips and weaving them in and out of one another on the timeline.  I did almost zero color correction, just cranking up the contrast and adjusting brightness throughout.  I really liked working with the native footage that was shot and not having to convert, and titles were very simple to do the way that I wanted to.

=-=

In the end I had a blast.  I enjoy shooting these types of things on occasion, and the band put on a hell of a show.

quickie editing and navigating in protools vid

After a twitter conversation last week I decided to shoot a quickie video covering something that wasn't discussed - how I tend to navigate around in protools without constantly zooming in and out.

enjoy!

the kickstarter experience pt 6 - recording, editorial, metadata

Recording day was pretty stressful, but also all kinds of fun.

As soon as the regular work day wound down, I grabbed a coworker and our intern and we headed to the trolley barn.  

I posted some pretty heavy updates on the kickstarter site about the whole experience with photos and vids, so check that out here.

The long and the short of it was that I got some unexpectedly cool stuff and lost some mics unexpectedly due to various issues, as is to be expected in big complex time crunched recordings.

If I had it to do over again I'd have put the schoeps in the blimp outside of the car (although that blimp did have some near misses in traffic) and I would have not put the 421 on the controller because its recording was completely destroyed with RF.

---- 

Once everything was back in the studio I spent a few weeks editing.  Details and pics here.

My process was to put all of the files into a protools session and line them up chronologically.  This gave me about 7 different perspectives of 2 separate 30 minute trolley runs.  I did whatever processing was necessary per track (mostly gain matching and a little eq) and then came up with a composite mix to deliver in addition to the split out onboard tracks.

I then went through and listened to each individual track soloed out and edited out any craziness I came upon.  This process took for damn ever.

With the entirety of the tracks placed, processed and edited I listened through again and divided each set vertically by event.  In this way the files I delivered would be sure to line up to one another in post, so that an end user could potentially create a new mix from the individual mics that would line up quickly and easily.  I then used a quickkey script to rename the individual regions.  This also took for damn ever.

------------

With everything edited and exported I then went into metadata mode. Details and pics available here.

Soundminer is really the best tool for metadata editing, as it can do batch changes with ease and will embed the metadata into the bwav header.  I used my standard process of copying the filenames into the description field and then using batch functions to add more data in groups.  I then copied the descriptions down to the bwav description fields, added the photos and embedded all of the metadata.  This took time, but not as much as the editorial.

With all metadata embedded I triple checked everything in the protools workspace and in itunes.  

------

Last step was to export the different versions into different folders and set up different logins on our ftp for the different backer levels.  Then post the files, download them from home as a test run, open the downloads and (finally!) distribute the links to the backers.

The entire post process is what really takes a good amount of time and is a primary reason that I feel one would have a heck of hard time raising any serious money doing even very successful kickstarters.  

Truck record-part 4:cataloging and databasing

In part 1 of my truck record retrospective I talked about the prep work required to get ready for a full on vehicle record. Part 2 covered the actual recording date, part 3 went into the editing process, and now we'll put the whole thing to bed by cataloging and databasing.

-----------

I usually set a certain number of hours aside each week to deal with the ongoing task of cataloging and databasing the various sounds that I record and collect day in and day out. In the case of the trucks recorded for Benavides Born this process didn't really start until after the film sound was edited, which meant that there was a few week lag between recording and databasing.

Sometimes this kind of a lag can be detrimental to the process, but for a straightforward soundset like this the process went pretty smoothly (though still pretty time-consuming).

As a side note here, even though I work in a facility with 5 total engineers I do all of the sound effects databasing myself if I can. By doing the databasing I get to hear, varispeed and otherwise become familiar with all of the sounds as they go into the library. I also get to pick the metadata and can input it in a way that is both relatively standardized and as thorough as I need it to be. Filtering all of the facility's recordings through my databasing process plugs me in to everything going on with regards to the library, which makes me a more creative and efficient sound designer.

In the case of the truck recordings my labeling system is pretty straighforward and thorough. In soundminer I list the word "auto" then include make, model, type of move and fill in the mic used. Then I tag the files with the appropriate photo.

On this specific vehicle the whole process produced about 2.5 gigs of data, 66 unique files, and about 20 photos that got tagged to various moves. Here's a screenshot of my general output:



Once all of the metadata is in place I use soundminer to embed it and the photos into the wav files themselves.

The final step is to move them to their final resting place on the main sfx server, scan the embedded files into the main sfx database, and redistribute the database to the facility.

-------------

After much planning, work and editing we now as a facility have immediate access to pretty full coverage of something that was needed for and recorded in context with one of the many projects that run through here. This process is incredibly important to keep up with during the course of a project so that your internal bank of sounds grows and becomes more unique with each passing project.

Failing to edit, catalog and database unique recordings like this is just not an option for me.

--------------------
That was the whole process. Benavides Born was a true pleasure to work on, and I'm always grateful when I get to work on interesting projects with creative and interesting people. We have pretty cool jobs in the sound industry. :)

Truck record-part 3:editing

In part 1 of my truck record retrospective I talked about the prep work required to get ready for a full on vehicle record. Part 2 covered the actual recording date, and this part will go over the post and editing process with the final recorded files.

I've thought a bit about how to approach this particular blog post, and I think I'm just going to go mostly with words here and less with screenshots and audio or video.
-------------

Once I got all of the files back into the studio I dumped the raw tracks and photos into a folder on a drive called 1993 Ford F150-raw. I needed to jump right into editing the sounds into the film, which mean I really didn't have time to go through a formal library edit/metadata tag process at first.

I had tons of stuff, so I started listening to the audio slates I had given at the top, and used those to roughly rename the files. This was mostly a working naming system that looked something like Truck-onboard-tire-start stop by-20mph.

Once I had my roughs labeled I opened a 24 bit 96k protools session and imported everything. My first order of business was to come up with something from the onboard mics that I liked. Each onboard truck mic angle was put on a track, the tracks were routed through an aux and out to a mono print track. I started playing with balances and EQ until I was getting a moving vibe that I liked.

My initial impression was that I was very happy with my control of the wind during the shoot. I was also a little surprised at how much rattling and craziness was going on in the engine compartment when monitored soloed out on the big speakers. When I put together a comp track like this I'm looking for which mics and textures are working in which frequency range. For example, the tire mic was very good for mid range whirring and high end grit so I pulled back the low end there, while shelving back the top end of the exhaust mic a bit to replace that part of the spectrum with a better texture. The engine mics were used pretty sparingly, and the end result of each move was a balanced and mixed mono track. I knew I still had the split out iso's if I needed them in the edit, but I had made the determination that I'd go to them only as needed.

My next move was to deal with all of the foley. Some of the foly was in mono, some was in stereo, some was pretty loud, some was pretty soft. I did no dynamics processing here, though I did boost the levels on some of the wide angle door opens and other softer moves for usability. Mostly I was dividing sorting and naming though.

The same process followed for interior driving moves, exterior moves recorded with the shotgun, and anything else we recorded that day. Listen, divide, name, and process if needed.

This whole routine took the better part of one working day, but it made the next step very efficient - cutting the sounds into the picture.



With all of the prep, this step actually went pretty smoothly. Only in a few spots did I feel like I needed more coverage, and I was able to augment my recordings with a variety of library stuff and other recordings I'd done. I got through the entire truck edit for the film in around 2 days, and was very happy with the result.

------------------

My main takeaway from this part was that the time spent prepping the whole process paid huge dividends when it came time to actually cut the sounds into the film. A lot of sound effects editing is ingredient based cooking, and when you take the time to get the recordings right and mapped out on the front end then the back end editing becomes the easy part.