My long and varied collaboration with Edward Guglielmino continues with a slasher flic/music video.
Combining camBLOCK motion control with buckets of fake blood.
Category: Music Video
The record label contacted Graetzmedia director Dan wanting “lights and pyro” but only had budget to cover a single flame canon.
So I got to work designing, inventing and fabricating on 3 different setups:
Audio-controlled lighting: With the song stems controlling stage lights.
Flame Tubes: My versions of the classic “Reubens Tube” science experiment, with audio controlling 6 separate channels of propane-tubes.
Sparkler Cannons: To enable model rocket igniters to trigger the difficult-to-burn sparklers, I had to come up with my own mixture of gunpowder.
I’m really proud of this one.
Both video and audio for this clip were recorded in a single session at the flood-destroyed Graetzmedia studios in West End, Queensland, Australia.
To achieve a perfect focus pull over the 4-minute staring contest, I modified the camBLOCK moco system to control a follow focus whip. This clip was the first shoot to utilise this technique. Several months later, camBLOCK shipped their official focus/zoom motors.
There is no trickery in the single-shot nature of this piece. Cowper really can keep his eyes open for that long. In the dozen or so takes we shot, I think he blinked in two of them.
This is one of those videos which should be watched first, then explained:
This was one of the most fun videos I’ve ever been involved in. Well and truly nestled in the “fast, cheap, effective” philosophy, we went from concept to completed shoot in under 24 hours.
Ben Stewart approached me with a small budget and a catchy song. On Saturday night, while waiting for Rachgirl to get off the phone with her mum, I did a little experiment with party poppers and the 200FPS slow motion mode on my camera.
I called Rowley Cowper up on Sunday morning with “bring your tools over, you need to make me a device to set off 200 party poppers at once”. Ben and I bought the local shopping centres out of poppers, Billy Hyde’s out of ukuleles, and we made it to The Edge in time for nightfall.
As it took almost two hours to load the launcher, and as we were shooting in The Edge auditorium after closing, we only had one chance to get the shot, so we did about a dozen rehearsals before the “live fire” exercise.
Letterbox Lullabies is a series of intimate house gigs put on by stalwarts of The Troubadour, Brisbane’s most beloved music venue. This was my second Letterbox Lullabies shoot: Surface Paradise, featuring Matt Redlich, Rowley Cowper and Timothy Carroll.
For these shows I aim to be as unobtrusive as possible, so these videos were shot on a single handheld Digital SLR, with audio recorded by Anto Pink and mixed by Matt Redlich.
The performance of Look At Miss Ohio was one of my favourite live music moments from 2010.
For The Gulf Stream, I wanted to experiment with stabilization (and a little motion tracking of guitar) on the DSLR footage. I was able to get the hand-held footage pretty smooth, but the rolling shutter of my Pentax K7 makes it a bit hard for video geeks to watch.
The entire set is available for download from http://surfaceparadise.bandcamp.com/
Cowper played at The Edge‘s first Show Pony showcase event. As a Catalyst at The Edge, I was responsible for tech setup and mixing live video, as well as VJing other artists on the night, alongside my weapon of choice: Cowper.
With a couple of capable camera assistants, I was able to put together edits of two songs from the Cowper set:
Audio from this set is available for (free) download.
Long-time collaborator Edward Guglielmino. Failing over and over. A beautiful desaturated mandala of fail.