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

Is this song culturally relevant anymore? Probably not.

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?

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.

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:

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.

Well, I started this within 4 or 5 days of my Katy Perry iPad video, and it took my until now to finish it. Honestly, i was like 85% finished about 3 1/2 weeks ago, but I just couldn’t find the spare time to get that last little bit in… until this morning.

This song is way more intricately arranged than the Katy Perry song. Significantly more time went into figuring out how to replicate all the instruments I heard, especially in regards to figuring out what sounds to use for each one. Turned out that the best sound for that one shaker part was the salt-shaker app.

I ended up splitting up the piano part into two different apps, as it was too difficult to try to squeeze all my fingers onto one and play it the way that was needed to play. And the guitar strum, well… there is no good way to strum a guitar on the iPad, so I put some delay on the fake guitar sound and played it as you see in the video. The delay kind of makes for a good “strum” sound. Kinda.

I was really stumped regarding what sounds to use for the vocals. I ended up settling on the NES video game sound, and decided to play it on the game-pad instead of the keyboard (which the App offers). But since I couldn’t switch octaves fast enough, I split the melody into three parts which I played separately. You see, the Cat piano doesn’t have the option to change octaves, so luckily all of Katy Perry’s song stayed in the same octave. Cee lo… not quite the same.

Unfortunately it’s been so long that I’ve even forgotten one or two of the apps I used to make it. Except for, obviously, the panda piano…

NESynth – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nesynth/id323362982?mt=8
Salt Shaker – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/salt-shaker/id303186136?mt=8
Music Studio – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/music-studio/id328608539?mt=8
Drums! – http://itunes.apple.com/app/drums/id311549739?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2
Synth – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/synth/id364905862?mt=8
Magic Piano – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/magic-piano/id356416346?mt=8
Tambourine! – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tambourine/id343819796?mt=8
Dog Piano – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dog-piano/id322005897?mt=8
Panda Piano – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/panda-piano/id368328295?mt=8

Well, I finally finished it. As I said in an earlier post, adding video to this whole recording business makes everything take 3x as long… and THEN you have to edit the video. Although I learned a couple things.

I set up two cameras for each take, which added to the length of recording ’cause i had to mess with two cameras the whole time. I pretty much only used one angle for each instrument… pretty much. So next time I do something like this, I may not do as much with the cameras. One angle is probably fine.

I didn’t do much to the song. You’ll notice it’s a couple of clicks slower and has a modern spin on the sound, but it’s pretty much the same ol’ beatles track. I actually started working on this song before the Teenage Dream ipad cover was even an idea in my head, but due to it being a pain in the butt to record I put it off until now.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy, and for reference, here is a link to the original song: YouTube

What if you took that EYEphone picture idea I had but made an entire video from it. Dammit I’m so mad I didn’t do this first!!

I haven’t posted just a plain ol’ link to another video in a while, but this one is just so creative and amazing, you should really put aside 2 minutes to take a look.

When your video goes from 300 plays to 61,000 in 36 hours, does that count as going viral? ‘Cause if it does, for the first time, I have a video gone viral. Or in the process of going viral. I was at my mom’s yesterday sending off a fax, and all of a sudden i noticed i had a lot of emails. They were all comments on my video saying that Gizmodo wrote about my video. At the time of this writing I have gotten over 20,000 views from Gizmodo alone. Then today at around 11, I glanced at my phone and saw i had like, 79 new messages in my inbox and this time apparently Katy Perry plugged the video on her facebook page. Which then gets added to her real website’s feed.

I’ve been really enjoying reading all the comments, which range from “cool!” and “fun!” to “Oh GOD MY EARS!” but I always understood that this video was something you either loved or hated.

When I made the video I figured it had the right ingredients to go viral, but Gizmodo was really the catalyst that started it down that path. Doesn’t hurt that Katy Perry is apparently a real big Cat person.

Anyway, I’ve been googling the video trying to see the sites that are linking, here’s what I’ve come up with so far, let me know if you guys find anything I can add…!

Gizmodo – link
Katy Perry’s Facebook – link
Katy Perry’s Main Site – link
Buzzfeed – link
Maclife – link
Guyism – link
Macstories – link
ThatPanic – link
YouTube-Trends – link
Kitty News – link
Frequency.com – link
MatrixSynth – link

This person turned it into an MP3 and you can download it from her blog:
TheDailyMew – link

And this is a German blog!
Gilly’s Playground – link

And THIS guy ripped my video off youtube and uploaded it to a different site as his own. Jerk. I guess that’s the real sign of going viral though…?
Jokeroo – link

I’ll be interested to see where the numbers go from here. Anyone have ideas how I should capitalize on this? I’m thinking maybe another ipad cover, but this time sans-cat piano. I think one cat piano song = novelty. Two cat piano songs = trying way too hard. Thoughts?