Stylish Nonsense - Ninja

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

The Standards - It's Nothing

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.

The Standards - It's Nothing from Gabriel Camelin (Freelenser) on Vimeo.

Concept and Direction: Cedric Arnold and Gabriel Camelin

Photography: Cedric Arnold
Post-production: Gabriel Camelin

2011
Bar sequence shot at Wong's place
more infos:
27/3 Soi Sribamphen, Rama 4 Road, Yannawa
Bangkok, Thailand, 10120
Sam Wong: +6681.901.0235

VW Minivan from Phatthi Buntawanit's family

For more information about the standards:
www.thestandards.tk

Sketchbook on Reflective Practice

This sketchbook was design for the module reflective practice 2, for my MA in Visual Communication with Birmingham City University. The goal was to explore how to create a good showreel, explore the use of DSLR video shooting for music videos and color correction techniques.

Open publication - Free publishing - More music video

Butoh, 550D camera and color grading test

As I never used DSLR Camera before for video purpose, I needed to test the advantage and inconvenient of such a tool. I also wanted to test color grading with a Color finesse. This is part of my thesis project.

This Butoh performance took place at Boka Photography and Fine-Art Gallery, Bangkok for the opening of the photographic exhibition called Butoh III 2010 on Friday 3rd of December 2010.

The video was shot with a 550D canon and a 28mm 1.8 lens

Location Scouting for Slowreverse

I spent a bit of time these two last days around Bang Sue train station. I chose this place for its unique combination of urban and nature, which I think fits with the band. I did some tests of chronophotography, as it is a technique I never tried before, I am planning to use it in my shooting.

Finding a way for a visual representation of the track

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.

Slowreverse Track analysis from Freelenser on Vimeo.

Example of pre-production
Originally uploaded by Gabriel Camelin

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...