This is the third time I worked with The Standards but this time it was a slighly different task. The band wanted a music video that could reflect their band presence on stage. They came up with the ideas of mashing up footage from all their tour into one music video. While working on their footage I felt that the result would be stronger if I also shot some more footage.
I went to Cosmic Cafe in December for one of their gig and shoot a few takes with a Panasonic AG-AF 100. These shots are important as most cameramen couldn't come too close on the stage, while I could. Editing was a bit challenging due to the different level of quality of the footage given but I definitely learn a new approach as I had around 7 hours of footage to cut down to 3 minutes and 40 sec...
For my final project for my MA in visual communication with Birmingham City University, I decided to move on to something more challenging. I explored the potential of using live concert and performance techniques to strengthen Music Video as an interactive media. Being a part-time Vijay in clubs and concert, I found it quite challenging to work on such approach as both music video and vijaying are giving a visual representation of music.
Being aware of the existing barrier between concert videos and music videos, I had to find a way to combine live visual elements such as projection and interactive visuals, with more classic music video techniques such as rhythmic editing, split screen and multi-camera cinematography, techniques I explored in the first 2 stages of my MA.
The final outcome of my project is a music video designed for the Thai indie band “Stylish Nonsense” using front projection on scrims and interactive lighting techniques.
Stylish Nonsense - Photos I took and compositedfor my pre-production
To get a more challenging result than a simple projection on background, I studied the use of scrims for front projection. Scrims are semi-transparent fabrics which depending where is the light source coming from, becomes transparent or opaque. Following the recommendation from Deyan, another fellow VJ (theWetCarpet), I decided to go for a dark grey fabric that I could set up in front of the 2 band members, allowing to see both visuals and the band in the same time. To achieve a better result, I also collaborated with Go Kun (Go Ueda), a japanese lighting sequencer who designed a set of interactive lights placed in different part of the stage.
We shot the video at Opposite, a venue own by the WTF franchise, sukhumwit soi 51
I was interview last month by the famous thai hip/design "A day magazine" and the publish the article last week. I was interviewed on the process of the music video from concept to post-production. If you can read Thai, enjoy!
Finally, it is done... the hardest work so far... Because of pressure from Birmingham City University to submit my work in time and difficulties for the band and Cedric Arnold the DOP to be available when needed, this project suffered from a considerable amount of flaws especially during preproduction. It was shot with a budget of 10.000 THB, mostly coming from the band and myself.
I did this timelapse video in Bangkok as a test for the newcoming Standards music video I am working on with Cedric Arnold. I used a Nikon D700 with a remote control in different places in Bangkok.
Here is what I submitted to Birmingham City University as some experiments of photography for Bands. You can see all the process below in other articles I wrote.
Finally here are my pictures i took for the thai Band Slowreverse at Bangsue Station on Monday 3rd of April. We went there early in the morning hoping for the sun... He was there, but clouds were here too. I could shoot for 2 hours until the monsoon took over. I think I have enough photos for promo purposes, but the light issue makes my editing more complicated...
Here are my first and second experiment using camera glued on pencil and a dozen of students. I am still considering working or improving the second experiment which in my opinion looks quite good however maybe lack of narrative or a stronger line of concept.
To facilitate my editing and also bring creative solution, I completed a few weeks ago a song map. This is rather simple:
I asked in December the musician to give me separate tracks for each elements he used in his song. I did this in case I was planning to synchronize some visual elements to some specific instruments (the singer voice for instance could interact by vibrating or scaling up and down some visuals through its intensity). The interesting part I noticed about it when i opened the tracks in Logic Pro is that they also have blanks, making noticeable for instance, where the guitar is playing and where it is not.
The idea of the map appears during production, when i was struggling about seeing where are the key moments of the song. I felt that track soundwave was uninspiring and left only a few noticeable spots. Therefore I opted for a system where every instruments could be displayed, facilitating the visualization of the track.
I didn't want to do a simple screenshot of my timeline in Logic, as the quality would be too low for printing in big size, i looked on internet for an application that could export the soundwave visual into vector. After a few minutes, i found an obscure application named Praat, an application for phonetics... but with a great magical option nowhere to be seen: exporting the sounwave into an eps file!
From that I could work in Adobe Ilustrator, change the colors remove the unnecessary attributes given by Praat and combining all into one file! Voila!
This greatly helped me during my editing mostly, where i could visualize the lyrics in its context, also to decide when to change from shot to shot.
I also did a video version of the file. So i could visualize directly in Premiere pro or after effects how the music is changing. To create the animated bars, i created an expression in after affects to link the size of each bar to the intensity of each instrument.
On the right side is one of my first draft of visual representation. I constantly needed to listen the music to place the main elements on the soundwave. I realize i could work much faster with each elements separated...
These are some of my previous photos I took during promo shooting or my own time. It is not the first time that I take pictures for bands but it is the first time that I will do a planned shooting for promotional purposes...
This music video use the theme of "film within the film" and the concept was to try to surprise Malay audience by giving them a feeling that they are watching an old 80s program until they realise at the end of the music video that the "real" band members are actually directing a music video.
This complex music video was directed in August and finished in october. I collaborate again with Nam Il Cho who directed the music video. I essentially worked on the visual effects, the compositing and supervised the 2D animation part (done by 2 of my beloved students...). Most of the effects and the compositing was done in After Effects and almost all the motion graphics were decided after shooting... after some long discussions. The animation part at the end was first shot on greenscreen and then rotoscoped frame by frame by Pussaya
This is one of the two music videos I have been working in during august to october. The music video feature several hip hop stars from south East Asia grouped into a collective named E.A.R. (East Asian Revolution) Shot in one day, it took several weeks of post-production as I had to work on it part-time due to my full-time teaching at Silpakorn University International College.
I have been involved in all the visual effects and compositing. I mostly followed the concept of the director (Nam Il Cho) who wanted to create a design of animated boxes. We planned first to shoot the boxes using LED, but for budget and aesthetics reason, shooting using standard lights was easier.
Basically, the inside frame and its color changed was done during the shooting while I had to work on the outside frame in After Effects. Every members of the band were shot separately and brought back together using layers and compositing. Some parts were shot in greenscreen and later added. Some shots in the music video sometimes combined up to 180 layers and were all combined using. All the boxes animation were design in photoshop before hand using pixel animation technique and later use in after effects as a color mask, thus allowing to create an impression that the light change like a huge LED screen.
