This weekend was one hell of a trip. I was called out to record an event for indie artists at a bar called Rad Brothers. So when the day came, I got my camera, my microphone, and my game face and set out. When the event began, the artists absolutely shone on stage. I am taking an incredible liking to indie music in general ever since my last gig at the Indie Music Awards. I met the photographer for the night, his name was Tyler Fergus. He's a very exceptional photographer and does it as a profession. Tyler was giving me some tips on photography and some tips on what kinds of lenses I should look out for. His FB page is as follows http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Tyf-Photography/176760879036856. He also does magic as a side job too and my God is he good at it. He did a few card tricks that I managed (not very well though) to catch on video which I will upload soon but will take a while due to the videos large size.
I am glad I was given the opportunity to do this because not only does it actually give me contect to write about, but it's also giving me an invaluable experience. I'm learning videography and photography on a more practical and professional level. Not many people are giving a chance like that so i'm taking it and running with it.
After the event, I decided to walk to the Go station because I imagined that it wasn't too far from where I was, so I can jump on the bus and be on my way home. I was tragically wrong...
The last post I talked about finding someone to help teach me a bit about photography and how I had a pretty good idea on who that person would be. Unfortunately, time moved a bit faster than I expected.
Last week, I was called to photograph the 12th annual Independant music awards... Pretty big task for me I must say, but I jumped at opportunity because I might not be so lucky to obtain an opportunity like that again. So the day of the event, I got my camera ready, cleared the memory on my 32 gb memory card and set off to the event. When I arrived I was given a media pass to get inside and the place was packed with talented local talent. When they performed, they shone on stage and made me proud to be a torontonian.
During the event, I set my camera on auto and started snapping photos of the artists. I got about 200 photos taken, some of them were terrible but most of them were pretty good. I'm personally really glad that I got to experience that because now that just makes me want to be better at it and I will soon enough.
The person that called me to action for the event was so happy with my work that she wants me to do another event for her next week. It almost seems like the minute I got this camera and began this blog that things are just being put in my path to entertain whoever is reading it. I'm now kind of anxious to see what happens next week.
SHAZAAM!!! We FINALLY completed mr. Kool-Aid's music video. It took a lot of hours of strict coaching from Kelz but we finally managed to get it completed. One of Kelz main concerns though was that I blurred the shots way too much, but I thought it would've been a cool effect but I was completely wrong. Instead I should've kept most of the shots focused and maybe some blurred rather than the other way around.
We used Apple's video editing software, Final Cut Pro X. It all seems so intimidating at first with all the functions and options to choose from but once you get the hang of it (and actually learn how to use the bloody thing) then you begin to realize how much of a great tool it really is. It gives you a lot of freedom to do what you like and get the final product that you want, come to life. But of course, we had many issues that we ran into but I'll only go through a few, I don't want my hands to cramp up typing it all up.
Our issues began with trying to find a good concept to base the video on using the clips that we have. Now, due to time constraints of last week, we couldn't get many shots as we liked so we had a limited pile of clips to work with. But after careul analysis and planning we finally came up with one but then came another problem which was trying to sync the music with the video properly. Finding the right clip to go with the right lip sync was a difficult task, especially when you have a concept of how you would like the video to look but don't have many good shots to work with because most of them were... blurred... The final issue I'm going to mention is where we lost a good chuck of edits that was really good but lost by accidental deletion. It was a whole minute of video, just before the hook kicks in that I accidently messed up on. We had an amazing intro to the music video, one that I was proud to call my own, one that took many hours to do, and I fiddled around too much and lost it when the computer froze. We still managed to make another intro, but the magic couldn't be recaptured. I don't want to dwell on it too much but it hurt when we couldn't retrieve it due to us setting it on "save every 30 seconds", but oh well, lesson learned.
I learned quite a bit in the video editing department but only a fraction of what can be done. I do plan on getting a deeper understanding of how to do it and I surely will. You will one day see a commercial, or even maybe a music video created by me. Now I want to see what I can do with photography. One would think that film and photography go hand in hand, and in some cases thats true, but upon further investigation, they seem to be woooooorlds apart. Now I need to find a coach to help me get started on this, and I think I have a pretty good idea on who to contact. But as for now, enjoy this clip of the music video that I managed to sneak away with my Blackberry. Kool-Aid didn't want me to put his video out but consider this to be a "leak". I refuse to come here empty handed ;)
This week was quite eventful. I finally met up with Kellz and we finally shot a video together. We then learned that an up and coming artist named Kool-Aid was interested in making a music video for himself just to see how it would turn out and was more than happy to be our guinea pig.
All three of us met up later on during the week to find areas that looked good enough to shoot. When we found one, we then decided to have a theme for the video. We chose to have him in the desert at first then in a forest in an army uniform. In the middle of shooting my camera ran out of battery juice, so we had to run and find a place to charge it back up to get a bit more shots in. We found a nearby apartment building and as someone was coming out I jolted in, found and outlet and put that bad boy in for about 10 minutes because the time we had was short. After that was finished, I bolted back to the scene and we continued from there and continued shooting until it died again. The shooting took only about two hours to do because we all had places to be at certain times, so we didn't get a lot of footage to play with for editing, but we did what we could.
After shooting, we went back to Kellz editing room and began editing, but unfotunately we ran out of time. But I didn't leave empty handed. I managed to sneak a picture on my phone of what we were doing. You guys can thank me later. :). Next week I should be meeting back with Kellz and we should have this thing finished. See you next week.
