Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Fuzz Bucket Video - Descension April 20, 2015

(This photo is from a previous jam session that I haven't posted yet. I was having fun pulling frames out of the video. Apologies to Jamie for the grimace photo but it was too funny!)

Musicians:
Dan Shimmyo - Tenor Sax
Jamie Williams - drums
Eric Maurer - Novax CH7

Last Monday night after generating CG fur on animated characters all day I drove over to Eric's house with my Tenor Sax and 4 GoPro cameras. Eric's basement is already set up with microphones and recording gear. He handles the audio recording and I handle the video recording.

GoPro cameras setup:
3 X Hero 3+ Black Edition cameras:
I'm pretty sure this is the first time I tried recording 24fps instead of the standard 29.97fps. I'm doing this because I believe it shoots a sharper image and still gets the same low light sensitivity and same battery life, although strangely it uses up more disc space. They're all set to shoot in SuperView (ultra wide) mode.

1 X HD Hero Original
I set this camera up to record in PAL. I'm hoping by recording at 25fps I'm decreasing the shutter speed and allowing more light sensitivity. But the footage doesn't look too hot so maybe the resolution is still too high (720). I mounted this camera on Eric's guitar but fortunately in this video he's not playing it.

Descension
Out of the 90 minutes or so jam session I chose this clip for the video after Eric and I both independently chose this clip to post on soundcloud. I think we liked it because it was a reasonable length, feels like it has a beginning, middle, and end. Usually we like to end on single note concisely but instead we kind of let it trail off. Well, we make this stuff up on the fly so we don't always communicate our intentions clearly...
One of the things I like about this video is that you can tell that we're having fun. Yeah, there are some rough parts where we're all stumbling a little but overall we found a few cool grooves and transitioned into other cool parts.
I chose not to use split screen effects because it seemed like too much work. Actually, I think it's a lot cleaner without splitting the screen. I also like to be able to split time from one musician to the other to hilight what they are playing. When I thought my sax playing was a little too sloppy I even switched to one of the other cameras to take your mind off the sax.

Well, if I haven't scared you off, please check out this video of 3 CG Animation nerds playing improvised music in the basement.



And here's a teaser from our next jam from this Monday the 4/27. I was looking for funny faces and I found a bunch in the drumcam footage. Enjoy!