A few nights ago my fiance was going through her email, which is now cluttered with wedding checklists, “prepare for the perfect day” articles, last-minute-reminders, you name it. We’re down below the 1 month mark, which is like blood in the water to the wedding-business sharks—as if we’re not already talking and thinking about it enough without the constant reminders of how close our date is.

One article that she read aloud to me (in a “is this dumb or what?” voice) was 10 ways to stop stressing about the big day. Among the worthless “visualize the perfect weather!” tips, there was one that I actually agreed with—wholeheartedly, even!—and is a technique that I’ve used many times in my design career when staring down the barrel of an overwhelmingly large project.

“Stop trying to do everything at once by by focusing on a small detail.”

This post is about a small detail of my ongoing Captain of Industry video project. It’s name is Keyla.

There’s no denying that the backbone of this project is the footage of the band members. But closely behind that comes the environment, which will be a claustrophobic clock-tower / elevator shaft / steam-punk mess of gears and machinery. Most of what you see will come from still photos, and it’s my job to keep them from looking fake.

To add realism, I always knew I wanted some other filmed elements. At the top of my wishlist was a rat. Not only will this little supporting-character be seen scurrying across beams in the background, but the video will open on a close-up of a rat running in a wheel.

I’ve waited months and months for my chance, and it finally came last weekend. My fiance and her cousin went out for the night, and I agreed to babysit on one condition: when the lovely miss Ryder Rae came to spend the night with Elijah on Saturday evening, she was to bring her pet rat Keyla, and when Ryder left, the rat stays with me for a few days.

Done. I sent out some texts on Saturday, and within a few hours I had a small crew ready for a Sunday night shoot. Tyler Morris, (freshly engaged as well, btw!) the DP on the original Captain shoot, spearheaded the green-screen session at Real Art and with some luck we got some fantastic shots very quickly.

But wait, we’re not done yet!

As if I hadn’t already hit the jackpot with little Keyla, I had another star waiting in the wings. Bryan Campbell, one of  my co-workers at RA owns a hairless cat named Applesauce, whose fame has continued growing since his mildly-famous YouTube video just got posted by Ellen Degeneres. I thought this would be a very cool, creepy addition to the video.

We green-taped a few boards together and filmed both of our stars walking across the beam.

After some coaxing, I was also able to get some really nice footage of Keyla running in her wheel. It looks really awesome.

Here’s 2 quick tests I pushed to youtube.

Catwalk / Ratwalk

The Rat Whisperer

Lastly, we couldn’t resist the urge to introduce our two stars to each other. Let’s just say that the results were – well, predictable.

I’d probably do the same thing.

So, the 2nd shoot of the project went really well, and it gave a shot in the arm to a project which, admittedly, has lost all the momentum I had mid-summer. And straight up, considering the trip to Europe I returned from recently, the wedding I’ve been preparing for and the massive project I’ve been overseeing at work, the last few months have forced me to slow this video’s progress to a crawl.

But as the wedding countdown gets closer to zero, the idea of “free time to do personal projects” feels more and more real again. And believe me – especially after this second video shoot, I feel like there’s a lot of momentum to take advantage of.

Many thanks to Erin Camper and Bryan Campell for the use of their “talent”. I have a sneaking suspicion that the little details like these will make a big difference to the finished music video.

Tweaking film speed is something I’ve always wanted to try, and ever since I got it in my head that I would make a music video—long before that music video was even a Captain of Industry music video—I knew that warping time was a technique that I was going to use.

I’ve seen enough ridiculous rap videos to know that filming someone performing more SLOWLY than the original song and speeding up the footage is a pretty common technique, I think it looks pretty awesome. Now on the flip side, the classic Spike Jonze video for Weezer’s Sweater song is forever locked in as one of my all-time’s. With it’s time warping in the opposite direction, the footage is slowed down just to the point of a surreal, almost-but-not-quite-slo-mo. It looks like natural movement most of the time and only tips it’s hand when your brains, not your eyes, see something like Cuomo’s hair bouncing and think, “something’s not quite real.”

So, I knew I wanted to warp time. Now the challenge was deciding a few things: When? How much? Why? Important questions. ”When” and “Why” were style choices – at the beginning of this project, I decided to try to hit both sides of the spectrum – speed the footage up AND slow it down, which could be really weird if you don’t do it right.

Lucky for me, Captain of Industry is ridiculous.

In any given CoI song, you could find that the beginning of a song isn’t necessarily anything like the end—you could start out in one style and end up in a totally different place after the song ran it’s course. That’s one of my favorite things about this song: not only is the chorus a totally different mood than the verses, it even switches up the time signature. Appropriate for a footage speed change? Um, absolutely. I decided the that the verses will be sped up and the chorus will be slowed down.

I opened the song in my favorite audio editor (GoldWave has served me extremely well over the years) and split the song up into a bunch of small parts. I named them as best I could; “verse”, “chorus2″, “pre-breakdown”, “slider”, “insane”, etc. Afterwards, I saved each clip as “fast” or “slow”.

Now, how much do you speed them up and slow them down? Time to run some tests.

I can’t stress how important testing is to any project where you’re trying something new. Aspiring videographers, I’m gonna give it to you straight – you’ll never feel as retarded as when you’re doing a video test. This is how it goes — you make a game-plan and pick the variables, then you recruit some of your pals to help you because you can’t do it alone. At some point, you have to explain the plan.

They ask “What are we doing?” and you say “eeh, I’m gonna air-guitar and you need to film me.”

“Um… ok, you’re gonna air-guitar the captain song?”

“Yeah, but it’s gonna sound real weird cuz I’m gonna warp the time.”

“You’re gonna speed it up?”

“Yeah. And slow it down.”

“Both?”

“Yeah.”

“How much?”

“Dunno. That’s what we’re testing.”

“Ok. How many times are you gonna do it?”

“I’m thinkin around 20.”

“….”

“I’ll bring beer.”

“K. See ya Tuesday.”

Here’s my slow test. Make fun of me all you want.

Did Spike Jonze buy beer for his buddies before the Weezer video? My gut tells me no; somehow, being a legendary director, he must just know these things. But man, I don’t know a better way to figure this stuff out, and if Spike does then by all means Mr. Jonze, call me up and tell me how to avoid these awkward tests. Till then, this is how I figure stuff out.

Here’s my fast test.

So, I air-guitar’ed that song from 50% of it’s original speed to 200%, and after reviewing the footage, decided that 65% and 153.84 were the best speeds for this project.

Listen to one of the 65% clips

Listen to one of the 153.84% clips

I planned the test shoot for the same day that Pat build the green-street stage.  By the end of the night, we had a stage and a bunch of good test footage, and it charged everyone up for the real shoot.

To my team that helped me this night: Pat and Justin, Tom Tyler and Seth – thanks a million. That was a really productive, fun night, and now I’ve got footage of myself air-guitaring with a bass.

My next COI post will be a story that I’m not excited to tell, but since this blog is a ‘chronicle’ instead of a ‘case study’, it must be told.

Until then.

Every night just before I crash, I hit the Green Room in my house and give my computer a fresh batch of clips to start rendering. My machine chugs and chugs all through the late night and early morning while I sleep. I wake up, get dressed, start a new batch of renders and go to work. This is what the pre-processing stage of this project is like.

It’s been almost 2 months since we filmed this music video and I’m still going through these clips 1 by 1. It’s pure science — tinkering with the building blocks of time and space.

God Complex aside, this is damn repetitive. There’s 84 files that need massive pre-production, and that’s from Tyler’s camera alone. What’s that work like? Not hard, but it’s important to get right. In each shot, the background needs keyed out, which is an art in itself – trust me. I need the whole band completely removed from the studio at Real Art – no trace of the stage they were standing on or the screen stretched behind them.

Finding the perfect settings have been a real bitch. The image above shows my AfterEffects file at some point – you can see the keylight Effect controls are on the left.

Keying the footage is just a matter of adjusting those settings until your image looks good while keeping the edges as clean and sharp as possible. AE lets me copy and paste this effect to other clips, so all the footage from our Panasonic went really quickly. The clips from Tyler’s Canon have a little different color, so I had to find some new settings to get those looking good as well. Anything part of the background that didn’t get removed with the keylight needs to be masked out manually.

[ ed. note: like 3 weeks have passed since I started writing this post, and since then I found even better settings - enough of an improvement to start over and use these new settings, which meant re-rendering 94 gigs of video. Sounds drastic, but so what? My computer's the one doing this work, remember? ]   [ ed. note #2: Another few days have passed, and yep, I've re-keyed yet again. I'm realizing that there's no "perfect" settings. I need to get as close as possible and then move on. ]

So, why render all these clips back out, one by one, night after night? I want to get all this prep work out of the way then render it out and have FRESH CLEAN footage to work with for the rest of the project. I’ll archive all the original footage when I’m done and go forward with these new clips.

Time  is on my side if you look at this video project as a whole. I happen to have very large blocks of time in my day where my computer just sits there. I figure, might as well put it to use. So far it’s working. So, in conclusion my main point is this: Any time you can figure out how to keep your computer working long after you go to bed, you’ve struck gold.

But, remember — removing space is only half of this scientific process — bending time is a whole other beast.

To be continued…

A big part of this music video’s style involved filming the band performing the songs at both slower (65%) and faster (153.84%) than the real audio. In post-production, I’m in the process of re-adjusting the audio back to 100% speed in both cases which creates two separate looks – one all twitchy and quirky, and another slower, slightly-surreal type of movement.

The first time that we heard the sped-up track, we knew that the John Lakes, of all the members, would be facing the biggest challenge. Not only does the drummer have the most physically active job in the band, but he’s also the only person (other than perhaps the singer) whose performance live has to be spot on: it’s easy to spot a drummer who’s “faking it”; it just doesn’t feel right. (this is feedback that Lakes himself gave us when we suggested that he didn’t have to film with his full kit. John (wisely) insisted that it was worth the full setup time put his entire kit together.)

So, here’s a clip I was just reviewing.

Lakes just took his first stab at the chorus at this hi-speed and he’s warming up for another take. HOW ROCKSTAR IS THIS???? Notice the other members of the band giving him encouragement and helping him get psyched from off-camera. This shit is just too cool.

May 14th at 9 in the morning, I arrived at work. I poured a cup of coffee, and quickly after… poured another. Not unlike most of my mornings at Real Art, except for this was a Saturday. And, instead of working hard for 8 hours, I was about to play. Play very, very hard, for an exhausting 8 hour long video shoot.

This marks the first post in a series that I plan to continue throughout the summer and beyond. My goal is to document the process of an incredibly exciting, scary, large-scale personal project.

This is the first music video that I’ve ever filmed, and as if that’s not a big enough bite, it’s for a band that I hold in such high regard that humbling to even think that they would trust me to do a single track justice. And yet, that’s the leap of faith that we all made; the band, my video team, and myself.

Here’s 2 memebers of the crew (all volunteers – this was a 100% off-the-clock project) and a decent shot of the video studio at Real Art where we filmed. Tom Immen, my right-hand man and production manager by day, models our green-screen lighting situation while Tyler our cinematographer melts his face.

The rest of this project’s video crew includes Justin Dunham, both a Real Art web developer and photographer, Seth Deppner, motion graphics designer, and myself.

Captain of Industry is a Dayton band who Tom and I have seen play many, many late nights. I can’t say enough good things about their music or the guys who make up the band, but I’ll give it my best shot over time. These guys came into the studio around noon and we fired everything up.

Here’s Tyler lining Nathan Peters (keys, vocals) up with his Canon. (leave the model# in the comments, Tyler – you’ll all learn real quick that I’m no gear-head.)

Here’s Tom and Seth at the data table. Our setup (shown below) includes 2 macbooks, one feeding audio to our PA (so that the guys can hear what they’re supposed to be playing), and the second is running Adobe OnLocation, software used to preview and manage footage as it’s being captured. This software ended up biting us pretty hard… but we’ll get into that in another post. Also we have a few external hard drives, a bunch of wires and a remote PA mixer.

Looks pretty awesome huh?

The band filmed each of their tracks to the song separately on green screen. I was worried that it would make for a super awkward ‘dentist-office scene’ where one band-member got his teeth pulled after another, but these guys were so cool it wasn’t even funny. Not only were they relaxed and in great spirits, their performances on a blank, green stage were spot-on. They gave us 100%, and we filmed every second of it.

Above: Kevin Oldfield – Below: Tommy Cooper.

We filmed with 2 cameras at all times, Tyler’s personal Canon and Real Art’s Panasonic HVX. Here’s Tyler on our 2nd camera’s preview.

Bryan “Ghostly-onlooker” Campbell sits in the audio room next door, presumably behind safe glass just in case Tommy gets a little crazy and starts smashing the room. Also, not pictured is Patrice Hall, long-time Dayton music scene veteran, who volunteered to kick it with the band, buy pizza and lend a hand during the day. You’re the bombb, Patrice.

Sorry Ian, no photos of you – those smooth bass notes were too mesmerizing to behold and operate smartphones at the same time. Yes, your performance prevented even the most basic multi-tasking. Don’t worry, we got plenty of beautiful footage of you destroying it.

…And finally, because I raided my friends’ phones for images, a few Insta-Gram-ed shots to end on.

My long-term goal with this blog series is to keep the band up to date, encouraged by progress and up to speed with my thoughts and process.

But probably a much longer-term goal is to shed light on the hard-to-see side of the creative process – the non-glamorous, not-so-confident side. The side where you have to ask a group of guys you barely know to trust you, hop along for the ride. I’ll talk plenty (read: “too much”) about that, I’m sure. How did this project start? Where did the concept come from? How did these 5 musicians end up here in this studio? We’ll get to it all over time.

Anyway, for now, cheers! Time for me to get some sleep. Until next post.

Somewhere deep within the “my old stuff” box was this super squished Michelangelo, made from folded graph paper and colored with some kind of cheap thin-tip markers like these. Even though it’s beat-up pretty badly (and he lost part of it’s head at some point) it still looks pretty good!

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Possibly the most awesome thing ever.

I’ve heard people say ”don’t lead with your best!” but I can’t help but make my first post about this kickass megaman tribute.

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