5-10-23-Skiddoo

I had a pretty exciting weekend professionally.  After shooting cheerleading competitions for the past two years, I had the chance to shoot a different, more traditional sport: football!  A guy I worked with in the past named Ed, who is based out of Philadelphia and has his hands in a lot of things, contacted me to shoot a high school football game Saturday afternoon in Montvale, NJ (a two-hour drive for me) on two days notice.  I took him up on it since I'm up for anything, especially something new.  The shoot was for iBN Sports, a Los Angeles-based company that is doing more stuff on the East Coast now.  Instructions called for me to shoot in 16:9 in standard definition, which is no problem at all on my end.


During the shoot, I worked with a New York-based broadcaster.  I had to pick him up on the way to Montvale by stopping in East Orange, subsequently getting lost in that town going to and from the shoot, but that was the only real negative on an otherwise smooth day (plus I left home early enough to give us plenty of time for error).  Using an XLR adapter I have attached to my camera at all times, he plugged in his headset mic for one channel of sound, while the other channel was for my shotgun mic picking up the game and crowd.  I was told to bring a monitor when I was brought on to do the job, so I bought a 15" monitor that same day which I would be needing down the line anyway.  It helped me make sure the picture was accurate and wouldn't actually be too dark or too light on the tape, plus the broadcaster used it on occasion for reference  We were shooting from a media booth right above the crowd that housed a couple other broadcasting representatives, including the ESPN radio station out of New York and Verizon.  The sound came out good, the picture was good (the weather was on our side), and the football game itself, between St. Joseph's Regional and St. Peter's Prep, was actually quite fun. 


After wrapping up, dropping off my broadcasting partner at the train station and getting lost in East Orange again, I met up with Ed so he could get the tapes from me and edit them.  Sure enough, as of last night, the game I shot is available for streaming on iBNSports.com.  It's free to watch, but the site requires Microsoft Silverlight (a video format free to download and trying to rival Quicktime) to view everything.

All Quiet on the Impending Autumn Eastern Front.

Short entry this time around as I'm in the middle of some downtime since I started blogging.  The most video work I've done has been making copies of Release The 7"!.  I spread the word on the DVD on the Facebook pages of the involved bands, as well as on my new Twitter account (nice to be here in 2009).  That and the YouTube trailer helped a little, as some of the band members have requested the free copies they're entitled to.  Just started getting some feedback on it today - positive no less - and that makes me feel really good.  

I also started spreading the word the old fashioned way by finally getting a newspaper ad.  Despite what I previously thought, it is indeed possible to get in contact with these people.  My only gripe with the ad, albeit a small one, is that the graphic designer manipulated the picture I've been using.  It could have been worse, as originally he had a stock photo in its place.  Otherwise, I think it came out good.  It's currently running in a weekly paper that serves my general area, and I'll possibly get it going in a larger paper.  Hopefully this will lead to new projects.

Merch Alert!

"Stick a fork in it, it's done," doesn't seem very appropriate.  Wouldn't want the discs scratched...

Bad jokes aside, Release The 7"! is 100% complete, a mere two weeks after I shot it.  If I was able to live completely off my video work, it would have been done even sooner.  Nevertheless, I'd say it would be done by the end of the weekend and the weekend isn't even over, especially with Labor Day.  Two discs covering about two-and-a-half hours of live performances by East Of The Wall, Dead Planet, So Is The Tongue, Zevious, and proud hosts A Fucking Elephant (no sense censoring it now), who's first album - a 7" vinyl with a free mp3 download - is what this project is named for.

Their album was limited to three hundred copies, so I don't know the status of how many they would still have if you were to contact them through their site, but their music is readily available through there and their other portals, as well as my DVD of them and the four other bands... which can be purchased for $10 plus $2 shipping.  If you're interested, just use the Hotmail address in the top right corner (under FURTHER DETAILS) to send a Paypal payment, plus I can take any other inquiries through that address and the comments section below.  To whet your appetite, I whipped up a trailer last night that can be viewed HERE!

This is the cover of the DVD.  I pulled a shot of Liam Neeson delivering his line (you know the one) from the Clash of the Titans remake (via the trailer online) and printed it out.  Rather than risk any legal ramifications, I then did a tracing of it, scanned it in my family's computer (I don't have a printer/scanner of my own), and then added color and text via Paint (look at me go wild).

Links to the other bands' music and merchandise can be found in this earlier blog of mine.

As a quick aside, so I'm not just hustling for myself, check out Cinematic Ruminations.  It's another blog by one of my Internet friends who loves movies as much as I do, only he's taken it upon himself to write reviews on what is hoped to be a regular basis.  He's really into horror.  His first reviews are of The Last Exorcism and Big Fan (rent that one).

Update Due.

The editing on Release the 7"! is 85-90% done and should be completed by the end of this weekend.  The footage was all imported late last week (had some evening commitments last Monday through Wednesday), and as it stands, I only have one band's set to sift through and cut up.  As planned, one band's set leads into the other by way of black title cards.  I've decided to use the font Impact for all of the lettering, most of it done in red.  The red font on a black background brings to mind grindhouse movies from the 70s, and it fits well with most of the music.  I also added some other titles during performances: some to identify members of a band lending talent to another band's set (namely the F***ing Elephant crew making cameos in So Is The Tongue's set), and some for comedic effect (at least I think they're funny).  For transitions that will cut out a little bit of down time, I found a transition under the Quicktime menu called Matrix Wipe, which is divided into sub-options.  The Random Matrix Wipe in particular provides a neat, static-like effect, not as crazy as a television on the fritz, but unique all its own.  The one issue I started having, perhaps in relation to the amount of footage I'm working on combined with all of the extra stuff I'm adding, is that the project would begin dropping frames during playback.  My biggest annoyance throughout my time editing.  I just have to remember to keep the most important things open and to save the project frequently; a dropped frame alert means I'd have to then close it without saving it and reopen it as its former self.

When all is said and done, the first disc will have the first two bands and a written introduction, and it will run for an hour.  The second disc, likely running one hour and forty minutes, will have the last three bands and end credits.  Once everything is through and chapter markers have been placed, I'll export the two movie files into Quicktime files and burn them onto DVD-Rs.  My exporting method of choice, amongst the through good selections Final Cut Pro 5 offers me, is Apple Intermediate Codec, which allows the movie to fit into a 16:9 television screen.