This video started the same way all Ball Park Music videos start – drinking coffee and talking about internets. The difference with Nihilist is that we grabbed those internets and decided they should be the whole video.
Tag: Post-Production
We had such a lovely time making the Ball Park Music tour visuals last year, so when it was time to release music from their first album in 2 years, Sam and the gang decided that they wanted to do some things that were leaning more towards visuals than traditional music videos.
Pariah is a sprawling, 7+ minute, mostly instrumental jam. Sam creates much of the band’s visual style through collage of old images, which fit the tone of the song beautifully, so I took his raw cutout materials, and turned them into a journey through time and space:
The band were understandably nervous about this kind of track being their first new material in years, but the public response to both the track and visual style was overwhelmingly positive, supportive, and loving.
So it looks like there will be a couple more of these to come. Yes indeed. We’ll also be able to use them as live visuals for future festival shows. Bonus!
Update: After release, Rage – Australia’s publicly-funded, greatest-music-video-show-in-the-history-of-the-world contacted the label to ask for a copy of the clip. I didn’t think we’d bother to submit a 7-minute long piece of mostly-visuals, but they played it third on Friday night, and then first up at 9am on Saturday! Thanks for keeping it weird for all these decades, Rage.
Brisbane punksters WALKEN. Three guys. Three cameras. Three locations. One robot. One Jaymis.
Sometimes things just Make Sense.
WAAX are a band of punk-as-rock, hectic kids. Their track “Wisdom Teeth” had been creeping up on Triple J and Unearthed for a couple of months, and needed a quick clip that would match the intensity of their sound and live presence.
I’m fascinated by timelapse, and I’ve wanted to shoot someone sleeping for ages. Not in a creepy way, you understand. It’s just that slow-motion and timelapse videos reveal stuff we don’t usually get to see as humans shackled to linear time. As a VJ I do a lot of thinking about different ways of using projection. I’ve used projection mapping in the past on buildings and inanimate objects. So sleeping dudes seemed like a completely obvious next step.
It was surprising how little convincing was required to get Little Odessa on board with the concept. My pitch was “All four of you, asleep in a bed together, with a projector blaring in your eyes. It’s likely to be the worst night’s sleep of your entire life.” They were instantly, unanimously in favour of the idea.
After designing and 3D-printing modifications to convert our 3-axis camBLOCK motion control system into a monster 5-axis crane rig, I needed a project to test out the system. Fortunately my buddies Little Scout were about to release their new single, and the aesthetic perfectly fit the multi-pass, audio-reactive ideas in my head.
Motion control gave me some delightfully crane-y multi-pass camera moves, and audio reactive lighting made the band members magically appear only when their instruments made noise.
This clip won Gold in the Music Videos category at the Australian Cinematography Society’s 2013 Queensland awards.
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.
With Sampology set to take over the audiovisual world with his Super Visual Smackdown, he needed a design refresh to show people what was coming.
Sam is pretty new to the video world, so he asked for some post-production services to give his set intro that extra bit of polish.
I animated titles, stabilized hand-shot footage, tightened the edit, and colour-corrected the clips Sam had brought together from throughout film history.
Long-time collaborator Edward Guglielmino. Failing over and over. A beautiful desaturated mandala of fail.