Lynn - "full of surprises" are perhaps the nicest words ever spoken to me. Being predictable is boring.
For me this is a moment of "putting my money where my mouth is", not from a directorial point of view, but technical. It is also the first steps in realizing a life long dream. Every song I have ever liked in my life has a short movie associated with it in my head. I have a long road ahead learning and making something out of it, but I intend for this to be what makes my rent, not working at a bagel shop. That job is killing me. Even if I have to do weddings... I do not care...
James - truth be told, I am not very confident about this stuff. An hour after upload, I had to resist a nearly overwhelming urge to take it down. That urge lasted until this morning when I just said to myself "it is what it is". So, hearing that it left you feeling a bit down was music to my ears (I hope that doesn't sound mean). If it failed in that, then I failed. The other things.. continuity, pacing... those are details... I feel the crux of story telling is achieving the desired emotion.
Frank - What John used for the song I cannot say. It never occurred to me to ask. He is like me though, in that he uses a variety of real, electronic and synthetic instruments with Project 5 and/or Sonar.
The tools I used were a big red camera body with a Matsu****a computer core with Leica lenses, with a merlin steady cam platform with onboard 8" secondary monitor. I used a fostex field recorder with dual AT Cardiod condensers, and an external time synch clock. It was shot in RAW and converted with my AVID Media Composer Hardware IO/codex NLE.
Bahahahaha... in my dreams. I recently bought a consumer level full HD (1920x1080 60i) camera. It has the distinction of having Carl Zeiss optics and a very good (though small) backlit sensor (fabulous low light ability and a full frame shutter).
I could not actually afford it, so I am taking a bit of a risk. Worse yet, I am on a "upgrade path" to the kind of camera I need to achieve my goals within the year... even if I don't eat (A Canon 35mm sensor size HDSLR - tv shows like House are being filmed with it, and the body is only a couple grand). But.. I have to. I have to pursue this dream once and for all. This is all I have ever wanted to do. The time of hesitating is over. Sink or swim.
The video production is the same as I used for the other vids. My very outdated Avid software. It does do HD including colorspace as of the last update three years ago, but it is not multi threaded so it only ever uses one core... so it painfully slow to edit, and uses huge amounts of memory and disk space (4 minutes of uncompressed raw HD video is about 40gigs in size). It brings the system to its knees IO wise. Poor thing is going to have a heart attack and die I fear.
I did not bother to adjust the color on this, or the white balance as it was going to be grayscaled and that information is not relavent. Sadly the Avid filters are rather poor for black and white, so I did it in the "mastering tool" I use which is VirtualDub... it does little but fix and tune avi files (the video equivalent of a wav) and convert the raw stream to mp4x264 avi encoding for full quality uploads (the resulting four minute file was 635 meg - HD is about 10 times the resolution of SD, thus the massive file size. Also the avi container holds an uncompressed audio track, so it is full resolution 48khz).
Sadly the camera shoots in m2ts (Blu Ray) which I cannot natively edit, so it has to be converted twice (once to get it into the avid, and once again on the raw edit output). Only a few modern NLEs currently support native editing of that stream. The avid is showing its age. The speed is painful. Depending on filter load, a "mix down" (render) can take 8 or 9 hours. Its all software driven, little of it really well optimized. But... it is quality. Paid for with a price tag of time.
Whew... wrote a lot... sorry. (Danny must be rubbing of on me
)
Thanks
Mark.