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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The music industry is stupid

The title of this post is not inherently true, but the evidence keeps mounting.

Many people don't have to listen to music on the radio anymore, and most that don't have to will actively avoid it. Talk radio, satellite radio, ipods that hold lifetimes worth of ripped music, and now streaming radio over mobile phones are all dominating the music listening scene that was once the sole territory of over the air broadcast radio and purchased cassettes/CDs.

For years now, musicians and fans alike have lamented the collapse of good music in the musical mainstream. Artists that don't focus group well are not signed, and consequently lots and lots of good music goes underrepresented and unpromoted in the national consciousness.

Further, the labels do a horrible job of promoting their back catalogue, since so much money is spent promoting the next annointed artist. They sit on mountains of musical gold, and falsely assume that the people that would like it both already know about it and have already purchased it.

Enter Pandora.



The Pandora project is one of the most comprehensive, well-executed, and well-implemented musical and social cataloguing and streaming programs created to date. It has become one of the most widely utilized forms of streaming internet radio, and is consistently one of the top applications in the iphone app store. It allows users to custom-taylor music according to their own tastes, while at the same time introducing viable new music from legitimate artists in the same vein. It allows for instant user feedback as to whether you like the song you're listening to or not, one-click purchasing from the itunes music store, provides cover art and musical history of the artist and the specific album, and has addressed the loudness wars by proactively setting levels for each individual song as it is encoded for streaming. It delivers via a simple and good looking interface both on the computer and on mobile devices.

The quality of content is through the roof.

Oh and it makes money hand-over-fist for the record labels, paying out a projected $17.5 million in royalty fees this year alone, according to a recent Washingto Post article.


And the labels are killing it.

Pandora is venture capital funded, and won't become profitable until next year. It pays royalties on a per song/listener basis through SoundExchange, which sets its rates based on a federally mandated system - which doubled prices this year as a result of lobbying by the record lables.

That's why the labels are stupid. They have spent millions lobbying congress for a system that pits the companies that are the most successful at selling thier music against those companies own success. Because it pays per play, the more popular Pandora becomes the less financially viable it becomes - and the venture capital money is about to pull the plug.

Pandora's music database alone should be worth millions to the industry, and it's done the heavy lifting on it's own dime. Its software and intuitive user interface that allows for instant purchasing should be worth even more, and yet it teeters on the verge of bankruptcy because of short-sighted and selfish stances taken by the labels that need to get back into the business of developing and selling music.

Worse, this is a problem that congress has to solve. Well, it doesn't have to - the labels could come to an agreement on the side with Pandora the way that they did with Apple when the itunes store launched - but they're very unlikely to do so. The labels consistently over-value the music recordings and undervalue the distribution and song-selection mechanisms, and this is unlikely to change.

You can shear a sheep as many times as you want. You can only skin it once.