Just a note that I've finally (after two years!) restored my music page and given it a proper link from the homepage. You'll find all my solo stuff there along with all the work I've done with Explone, Kirby Krackle, Kin to Stars, Pet Rock Star^S and other stuff. The (still functioning!) Demo Club exclusives are in there too, if you look for them. It's all powered by the much-beloved-by-artists Bandcamp and I've set all of my own music there to pay-what-you-like.
There's a Zen concept of "non-attachment" that I like to apply to everyday life, when I'm not too stressed out to remember it. At its core is a pretty simple concept: let go of your attachment to things, because things are short-lived, and desire for things can make you miserable.
It used to be that we'd joke about ease of use by saying "even my grandmother can figure it out." But the cold facts are that there's a better than zero chance that someday we'll be grandma's age and have to deal with user interfaces designed by bratty ingrates with no respect for the Old Ways.
It seems to me that one way to avoid (or at least delay) becoming a cranky "old person" is to accept that things will change, will always change, and not become too married to our favorite apps, interfaces and ways of doing things.
Like the "Golden Ballroom" video, we shot "Trapdoor" using my iPhone 4 and edited everything in iMovie on my Macbook Pro. This time I purchased a legit Steadicam Smoothee for iPhone 4/4S to get shake-free shots as I walked around the set. I looked into some build-it-yourself steadicam tutorials online but figured I'd never actually get around to building one. At around $120 it was worth it just to get the project off the ground.
We shot everything over two weekends at Pat's parent's house in Renton. We set up in the garage and strung a 9x12 canvas painters' drop cloth (purchased at Fred Meyer) as our backdrop.
A week earlier I had built an overhead lighting rig out of black foam core (also purchased at Fred Meyer). I might have gone a little overboard with the design -- the slats in the "pallet" had Velcro strips that allowed them to be moved if we needed to adjust the amount of light streaming through the gaps. We ended up never using this feature. The foam core ensured that the rig would be lightweight and lessened the chance of killing a bandmate if it fell.
I used carabiners to attach a clamp light above the pallet, and then we hoisted it up to the ceiling, attaching it to a bicycle wall storage hook. The original lamp was a little too bluish, but we happened to find another outdoor bulb on a shelf that gave off light that was more suitably yellow.
Then we used cardboard to mask off all the windows in the garage and closed it up so that the only light source was the rig. After wrapping some paper around the rig to prevent light leakage to the sides, it started looking like this:
That's what I'm talkin' about! The iPhone camera behaved beautifully in the low light, much better than I'd hoped.
Kyle wasn't available the first day, so we set everything up as described above, then shot Patrick and Nelson's footage. It was early September and it also happened to be indescribably sweltering hot. Like high 90s hot. Not ideal for being shut up in a garage. I had originally planned to create a DIY smoke machine (you boil water and glycerine together to produce a thick steam) but the smoke went straight up to the high garage ceiling and stayed there. Heat rises, who knew? Even when we were able to pull some smoke down into the shot, it barely registered on camera. And it was already raging hot in the garage, so we scrapped it.
Weeks passed and before I knew it, it was November, and we still had to get Kyle in for his takes! So we met at the house again and set everything back up. Only this time -- it was see-your-breath FREEZING. We'd had an early cold snap and there was actually frost on the grass. If you're wondering why Kyle is the only one wearing a jacket in this video, it's because he's the smart one. Kyle manned the camera while I did my takes and it was so cold my fingers barely worked. But we got what we needed and got out of there.
So remember: when you see Pat and Nelson, they're on the verge of heatstroke. When you see Kyle and I, we're courting hypothermia. LOL.
In the time between September and November, I shot most of the jumpy nightmare scenes. I'd basically find some tools or busted up wood lying around the garage or our rehearsal space and film it for a minute or two. iMovie effects were used to desaturate the colors out and crank up the exposure to give those bits a stark, dream-fragment quality. The animated rope-curling effects are done by just adjusting the clip settings to play at high speed. The creepy security cam shots were done with an Olloclip fisheye lens and using a Glif to mount the iPhone to a camera tripod jacked up as high as it would go.
All the principal shooting was finished by November 2012. So why did it take almost a year to finish this video? Because I am a master procrastinator. Once the fun of making the set pieces and shooting everything was over, I was left with the daunting task of actually composing the thing. All that syncing! All those jump cuts! And of course I had to choose the longest song of the EP (over five minutes!) to make a video.
Here's just a partial list of things I did instead of finishing this video:
wrote and recorded a holiday song
helped a stranger record a holiday song
mixed, remixed and re-remixed some demos I'll probably never release
drew somedoodles
began an iPhone app project (not finished either!)
read a bunch of comics
rebuilt my front steps
mortared the stone walkway in front
re-shot all of Patrick's footage and then threw it away because it wasn't as good
played through Bioshock Infinite
played through Borderlands 2 and most of the DLC
played through most of The Last Of Us
…all of which probably could have waited the 10 or so hours it took me to get from an empty iMovie project to the final edit. What eventually prompted me to finish wasn't artistic desire so much as shame avoidance. Fortunately, Resistance is a coward once you start swinging your fists, and I found that all I needed to get focused was to simply watch what I had done so far.
That said, I probably won't be committing to another video project for awhile. See, Diablo 3 is coming out for PS3…
Today is my birthday. It's also my 10th year in Seattle. I was 33 when we moved here. Also, this blog is nearly 14 years old. That is CRAZY. Anyway...cake!
So much has happened over the last two months I don't know how I'll summarize it on the blog. Maybe I'll do it in chunks? The Kirby Krackle "Sounds Like You" release show at the Triple Door was pretty insane considering the venue is basically a dinner theater. Not sure how easy it'd be to rock an audience that's seated and politely slurping Singapore noodles, but we pulled it off. I would even say we were nearly upstaged by our openers H2Awesome, who were crackling with so much crazy pent up we're in Seattle! energy I actually feared someone might fall off the stage and end the tour prematurely.
You can find a ton of photos of the night, along with our opening guests The Doubleclicks (who released their newest album that same day) and Molly Lewis, at the Kirby Krackle Facebook gallery, which I believe is public (and if not, tell me and I'll go yell at Kyle).
(tl;dr: skip this post unless you like iMovie tutorials.)
Okay so I recently made the mistake of dragging 24fps movie clips into a 30fps iMovie project. Well, it's not exactly a mistake. You can totally do this. But iMovie will warn you -- once -- and give you the option to covert the whole project to the lower frame rate -- once. If you ignore this warning like I did, iMovie will try to play your 24fps clips at 30fps. The result will be your 24fps clips will be all stuttery and jerky in the final product.
The obvious solution would be to lower the project frame rate to 24fps, right? Here's the bad news: once the project frame rate is set, you can't go back and change it. So the title of this post is a bit misleading...
However, there is a workaround! Which I'm altruistically posting here for posterity. And the Googlebot.
You can't change the project frame rate, but you can export the final movie at a different frame rate. It's actually pretty easy; the biggest drawback is you can't share the movie directly to YouTube or Vimeo using the options built into iMovie. You have to export the movie first, then manually upload it to whatever video site you use. A small price to pay for salvaging weeks and weeks of editing, IMO.
Here's how to do it:
From the iMovie Share menu, select Export using Quicktime… from the pop-up menu:
This will pop up a Save Exported File As... dialog box. Before you do anything else, click the Options... button near the bottom of this box:
The Movie Settings pop-up will appear, revealing some info about your project. Note that here the frame rate is set to 30fps. We're going to change that. Click the Settings... button at the top:
This will launch the Standard Video Compression Settings pop-up. Choose the frame rate you want from the Frame Rate selection box. In this case we want to ensure that the project is converted to 24fps, which will fix my conflicting frame rates problem:
Now click OK to save your changes. Note that on the Movie Settings pop-up the frame rate has changed to 24.
Click OK again to return the Save Exported File As... dialog. Click Save to begin exporting your movie. When it completes, the finished movie file should now play at 24fps consistently.
Ta-da, your movie is fixed and looks awesome again. Again, you can't directly share the video from iMovie to YouTube or Vimeo with the built-in sharing options. You have to locate the exported movie and upload it via the web.
Hope this helps someone out there.
UPDATE: I did find some message board threads that suggested editing the iMovie Project file to reset the frame rate. The Project file is literally called "Project" (no file extension) and is a property list file (aka plist) which can be edited by hand. Personally I wouldn't recommend this unless you're comfortable messing around in the guts of your Mac OSX application settings. If this is you, go nuts. But backup that file just in case.
