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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Moving In

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