Starving Artistry

Blow Cover

// October 15th, 2011 // 3 Comments » // Video

Has it taken me nearly 5 months to record and edit? Yep.

Is this song culturally relevant anymore? Probably not.

Acoustic Vids

// July 29th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Music, Video

So now that I have a decent amount of youtube subscribers, i’d love to get more videos uploaded but they all take forever. So I’m thinking about doing the acoustic song thing… no frills, just webcam, acoustic, and singing. That way I can get videos uploaded way more often.

Opinions?

Want You Gone Cover

// April 27th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Music, Video

This was actually a pretty quick video to put together! I finished Portal2 a couple nights ago, and thought the ending song was really well written… I love how Coulton changes keys from verse to chorus. I thought I’d take advantage of the catchy tune and lack-of-youtube-covers to try to cover it. I decided to do it on piano, and since I had my camera, Tay’s camera, and Troy’s camera, I was able to film three angles all at once.

Here is the original version, but I do have to warn you, the lyrics are slight spoilers, so if you are hyper-sensitive, i guess you shouldn’t listen.

But you should.

Day 109

// April 21st, 2011 // No Comments » // Photo, Project 365, Video

Skeeball

I know you can see a basketball in this picture. And yes, she is actually playing one of those hoop-shoot games. But the actual event was a competitive skeeball match, hence why the title of the photo is Skeeball.

Tay plays on a skeeball team, and tonight was the first game of the season. I usually have band practice on Thursdays so I didn’t sign up but since we didn’t rehearse tonight, I tagged along. It was a pretty fun excuse to get people together to hang out. Besides, who doesn’t like skeeball?

In other news, I figured out a good way to key out the white backdrop on the test shots I did the other day. I also applied a slight lens blur to the guys in the background to help sell the depth of the shot. I think I’ll be able to pull it off afterall. Check it out:

Day 108

// April 20th, 2011 // No Comments » // Music, Photo, Project 365, Video

VideoPrep

Today I started working on some test shots for the video i have in mind for “Can’t Even.” Can you tell it involves multiple “me’s” playing together? The test is to try to make it look like we’re actually in the same location playing, even though it’s just a plain white background.

Believe it or not, it’s just one 1000 watt work light I picked up from home depot for $30 lighting the backdrop. The camera was set to f/2.8, 1/80 shutter, and ISO 1000 @ 24fps. Space is definitely an issue. I barely fit on the backdrop with the bass and guitar, and even then you can see the bass headstock falls out of scope for a little bit.

Then there are the drums. I was only testing the shot using the rockband drums, but a real drumset takes up way more room! Ugh! So that light i mentioned earlier was set to camera right, behind where i was standing, but directly parallel to where I was sitting at the rockband set, so you can see how much light is bouncing off me and overexposing me. It may look cool in the long run though.

And no, the video is NOT just going to be me just playing with myself (har har). I actually have a story line in mind.

I was also messing with luma-matting to try to mask out myself so I can have some overlap, although at this stage of my experimenting I have some problems with translucency when say, my bass guy covers up my guitar guy. You can see through the bass to the guitar guy behind him. Any video gurus have any ideas as to how I can auto-mask myself out of a white background without these translucency issues? Please don’t say rotoscope.

Will have to do another round of tests tomorrow.