Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Fuzz Bucket - "duder Bucket" 5/23/2016


This video was shot at the end of a 2-day jamboree that I was calling Fuzz Camp. What was the occasion for this extended jam you ask? Well, our fearless Judge Fuzz himself, guitar player extraordinaire, head bobbing barefoot pedal stomper, Eric Maurer, was packing his house up and preparing for a move to the west coast, officially ending our 5 year run as Fuzz Bucket. But we've been jamming for a lot longer, since like 2008 or something, 8 or 9 years perhaps... Some of it has been blogged here but almost all of it is archived in a stack of hard drives 2 feet high.  I always joked that we have enough data to keep us remixing our stuff well into retirement, I guess I can get started on that stack now. Oh, boo hoo. Let's talk about this jam.

So, we invited our good friend Brian Dean who brought his Black Magic 4k Production Camera and this fancy lens: Rokinon Cine CV35-C 35mm T1.5 Aspherical Wide Angle Cine Lens with De-Clicked Aperture for Canon EOS DSLR 35-35mm, Fixed-Non-Zoom Lens
He also brought lights and a tripod and a few other amazing things.  Oh, and talent. We have the tools; we have the talent! (what movie is that from?)

After the jam session I wasn't terribly motivated to start working on the next video, I mean, that was our last jam session, man... A few weeks went by and the duder (that's what we call Brian) finally gave me a terabyte drive jam packed with 4K frames, totally filled the sucker up!  So, I had to get on Amazon.com and order some new drives so I could have enough space to start a new video project. Another week went by and I got the drives before hitting the next stumbling block, dealing with 4k footage.

The 4K footage came in 2 forms, a compressed .mov file and the original 4K images.  I started editing with the compressed videos but Brian complained about the gamma or some shit so I started experimenting with importing a 4K image sequence into Final Cut Pro X on my little MacBook Air.  Damn, that took all night and part of the next day just to transcode, and it barely played at all so I had to write out my own compressed video just so I could edit.  The new footage did end up looking nicer and I was able to crop it to full screen like the GoPro footage.  But for some damn reason I had issues with sync.  The 4k footage drifts ever so slightly.  I shouldn't have told you because now that's all you're gonna see. You can't unsee the drift!

So, this jam was pretty cool but I've listened to it so many times I'd like to rip my ears off every time.  The parts that annoy me the most are the repetitive bass lick (I've heard it way too many times, I can't take it anymore!) and some of the weak sax lines (they're just terrible).  My favorite bit is from 1:43 to about 2:05 when we just let loose. Pretty cool stuff.  That's when I think the improvisational nature of our jams really pays off.

But most kudos go to Brian for the beautiful shots of us.  This is by far the best we have ever looked in our basement jam videos.  Check out his blog here: http://www.brianpdean.com/ and send him money because he recently quit his job to pursue his dreams and apparently to play a game called Un-sharted? Something like that. Maybe he blogged about it. Check out his blog, bro!