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Week 6 • Scary

This week, I knew what I wanted.

I knew that the music was fairly atmospheric and spooky, so a scary story with overly dramatic images would be great for the final week before Halloween. I asked Kim to write a poem, then I focused on the visuals. My goal: I'd take extreme camera angles of interesting buildings in Cumberland, then add odd shapes and movement.

I knew what I wanted. And it could have worked, too, except for one thing...

It felt too similar to last week's zombie film. The point of the 52 Weeks project is to try new things, and pull together a wide range of visual styles and ideas. It didn't make sense to have two videos that would look similar, one after another. So while I knew what I wanted, 'what I wanted' just wasn't right.

Realizing this, I went out and took photos of every building on Dunsmuir Avenue for three blocks. When I got home, I used the photos as templates for creating stylizes images of each of the buildings. I discovered that, if I loosely outlined the major shapes of each building and chose colours from a specific palette, I could achieve a visually pleasing result.

By this point the poem was written. With only the preliminary work done, we decided to go to Vancouver for 3 days, but for a project like this, 3 days is almost 50% of the time time I have to create the video. Because I 'd only just started the artwork, I was a little worried. I'd completed about 1/6th of the buildings and didn't really have the shots finalized. I had a great time in Vancouver, but I started to get concerned that I might miss this deadline.

(It's strange. Because of the nature of this project, Cumberland has inadvertently become the star of the majority of my short films. In the last month, I've learnt more about this village than I had in all the 5 years I've lived here.)

Despite going away, despite re-envisioning my idea, despite the hiccups, it all came together. I even had a bit of time for tweaking. Enjoy the video, happy Halloween and a special thanks to K. Bannerman for her delightfully disturbing poem.

Week 5 • Before All Hallows

It's Halloween, and that means Zombies -- THAT was the inspiration this week. But, as with most things, plans that we made were changed and changed again. On Wednesday I put out an open call for zombies extras and got great response, but when I told people to prepare to film on Saturday, I discovered that almost everyone had previous plans -- my turnaround time is too quick. Many asked if I could wait a week or two, until they were free. I briefly considered it, but waiting a week or two meant missing Halloween.

Extras or no extras, it had to be Saturday.

With fewer zombies, the script needed to be altered; for example, the first draft of the script contained a lot more dancing. To keep the script valid no matter how many zombies showed up on set, I came up with 2 possible paths. If I had lots of zombies, they would form a zombie horde. If I had only a few zombies, I'd choose a 'hero' zombie and create a 'zombie clone army' with one lone actor.

On Saturday morning, we woke up early with a big list of jobs to do. Filming would start at 1:00 PM, and by now, we had three zombies confirmed, so I decided we'd go with the clone army version of the script. We headed to town to get blood-making supplies, a bit of make-up, a box of donuts, zombie clothes, and wood to make a portable green screen. Once we got home, we spent almost an hour creating a 4 foot by 6 foot green screen - many thanks to Jeff for his assistance! I wanted to isolate the zombies with the green screen to make the compositing process easier in post-production, but once we started filming, we discovered this wasn't going to work smoothly. With such a small crew and in such a busy little village, the green screen proved awkward. Without it, I was going to have to do a lot more work to create the zombie horde, but we could also film much more quickly.

I find the first element of a project, whether it's a song or a film, always takes the longest. As long as I push through that resistance, things generally improve, and this shoot was no different. I'd planned to do a bunch of deserted street shots to establish the tone of the film but Cumberland was hopping on a warm, sunny, autumn day. Shot after shot was either delayed or ruined by a car, bicycle or stray group of villagers wandering into the shot. I considered that I might have to just 'fix it in post' but instead, we got creative and moved to a side street that had a older building currently being restored. It was much easier to wait for a quiet moment here and get a good establishing shot! After that was in the can (or more accurately, on the memory card), things sped up considerably.

The reaction to our filming was pretty amazing. Everyone was happy to see us and quite amused by our zombie presence, especially two boys who desperately wanted to be in the film. I have to thank Jen and Jeff for all their hard work as crew and actors. I also want to thank my Dad and Laura for minding the kids while we filmed the short. Final thanks to Kim for being our lead even though she REALLY hates seeing herself on screen.

Musically, I was aiming for a 'Day of the Dead' kind of feel, with wind chimes starting things off and then bring in the ominous strings. I thought the accordion and choir would add the right balance of scary and fun.

PS For more information about the blood, the Toyota Echo and the bear, visit Kim's Blog.

Week 4 • Emerging

I came to the visuals for this week's video rather unexpectedly. I was doing tests for a 3D idea involving fonts and text, but it wasn't quite clicking so I remained open to inspiration. Early one morning, I was walking my daughter to school when I was struck by the beautiful fall landscape around me. Fog, sun, rain, and all the colours of the rainbow spread out before me. As I work better with restrictions, I created the challenge that I must get at least 26 shots in a small, specific location, namely the Number 6 Heritage Mine park in Cumberland BC. I started filming, amazed at the range of possible views I was capturing. In the end, I had more than 40 shots to choose from.

When I started editing the footage at home, another curiosity emerged. The first half of the shoot was virtually motionless. The shots appeared to be still images. At first I was disappointed but then I noticed the odd flicker of movement. It was almost like a "Where's Waldo" picture. I was tempted to put in one still image to see if people could find it... and maybe I did. :)

'Emerging' has long been one of my favourite song. It has a magical, orchestral quality that blends with a 1950's rock vibe. I love texture both musically and visually and find that I have to be careful that I don't add too much so that the textures become overwhelming. I think this song achieves a good balance. I also like to blend virtual instruments with live ones to increase the depth of the arrangement. This song contains 8 instruments including piano, guitar, drums, strings, celesta, and bass synth.

Week 3 • She Wouldn't Listen

This song was on my first CD many years ago. I've always liked it. The interplay between the rhythm guitar part and the bass line creates an interesting opportunity to use an unusual percussive pattern. I re-recorded this song for the project as I felt the CD version never captured the energy of the original demo.

I decided to go back into my notebooks for the inspiration for the visuals for this video. I found a complete storyboarded concept I created for a proposed live action video. I had always hoped to go back and make the video and the time has finally come, although the format is not exactly what I originally planed. In order to meet my time deadline I decided to scan each of the original storyboards and bring them into Photoshop where I could isolate each of the different elements. I then brought each shot into Motion where I created 3D sets with the 2D drawings and then added in the actors and props. While I'll be the first to admit that the artwork is not the greatest, I was pleased with the final look of the complete video and feel that I can finally check this project of my "to do" list.

Week 2 • Revolving Doors

I pulled the idea for this video from a previous concept. When my daughter was born, I concocted the idea of making a video a month for her first 12 months. While some of the videos weren't exactly brilliant, it was a great way to archive how she was growing up and to share the videos with friends and family that didn't live near us. When my son came along, I decided to do it again.

For his 3rd month video, I came up with the idea of taking every photo I'd taken of him and turning them into a flipbook-style video. I had recently written 'Revolving Doors' and it seemed to have the perfect energy and pacing for the video.

When it come time to do this week's video, I knew I wanted to use a similar concept. As I didn't have 3 months to draw from to create a similar concept to the original, I came up with the idea of taking sequential photos in an attempt to create a sort of 'photo animation'. It was a fairly tedious process but Kim and I managed to streamline things and soon we were spinning along. To match the beat of the music we needed to take 6.66 pictures for every second of music. The song is 1:40 or 100 seconds so we ending up taking almost 700 still photos to get the effect we were going for.

For the record, the water was really cold and yes, I did get wet.

Week 1 • The Joss House

I decided that for my first video I would sync projects with another artist (who also happens to be my wife), K. Bannerman. The original idea was to record her reading at the book launch for her new novel 'Bucket of Blood'. This seemed like a good idea until I mentioned it to her and she 'suggested' that she wouldn't like to be filmed. I decided to do it on the sly and as a result learned a couple of important lessons:

1. Don't lie to your wife but know that sometimes lying to your wife creates important promotional material,
2. If you're going to film anything, make sure you get good sound.

I did film the reading and it looked pretty good but the sound was horrible. I used all of the audio tricks I could think of and in the end it was barely passible. I decided this would be a horrible start to the project so I quickly came up with a new plan. I (somehow) persuaded her to drive to a dramatic location and reread the opening of her (brilliant) new novel.

It was wet, windy and the light was fading but we managed to get two takes before the sun set. Returning home to review the footage, I was pleased with both the video and audio and knew that I had made the right decision.

The music is a piece called 'The Joss House'. It has a wonderful tension. I love pairing sounds when I write music. For this song, it was the strings and the percussion. I've also enjoyed layering different music textures despite traditional conventions on what instruments should go together. For me, it's all about what sounds good and what's interesting to the ear.

52 Weeks Video Project

I plan to release one new video on YouTube each week for the next year, and so I'm calling this project the '52 Weeks' project. These are the rules:

1. Release one video every week for 52 weeks
2. Each video will be inspired by and use a predetermined song
3. All video must contain 100% new material but ideas and source material can be pulled from the archives (i.e. my old notebooks)
4. No new equipment can be purchase to complete this project
5. The music for this project will be arrange by season and will be available on iTunes
6. A blog entry will accompany each video

I plan to explore a wide range of genres for the project include documentary, experimental, fiction/narrative, animation, seasonal and cinematic. I look forward to the challenges in the coming weeks and hope that I will find an audience that will enjoy my project.

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