Wed Mar 4

Tonight we finished Trance TV episode 2! Sean and I met in the early evening to compile using some leftover footage we had and by creating some new segments.

I was able to finish the Forehead segment, shown in it's completion above, and Sean helped me complete finish the audio in Garage Band. We worked for several hours to complete the project, eventually finishing at 2 in the morning.

We were never able to reach our third producer, so between the two of us we came up with an additional 10 minutes of footage, when included with the 10 minutes we had both completed individually brought our final show to about 30 minutes total.

Tomorrow we will drop the tape off early in the morning so that it wil lbe able to play on Friday! This has been a strenuous time, making up for our no-show, but we did it, and both of us are very proud of the episode.

Tue Mar 3

Finished audio work for Trance TV, nature finished, forehead getting therep. I have been playing with various public domain found footage. The forhead segment is causing me some grief. I keep trying various different combinations of sequences and clips, but it remains difficult to make the foreheads all fly out of one another. This is like a big puzzle. I know exactly what i want it to look like, but i stil can't quite make it work. However, each time i try and fail i learn something new... so... at least there is that.



Need to work with sean to complete the soundtracks. I designed the audio for the nature sequence by myself, but my other clips will need music and i have been running into walls trying to design my own. Sean's input would be greatly appreciated. I will show my footage to him tomorrow.

Fri Feb 27

Felt sick, but decided to be productive regardless. After viewing my nature footage from the time defeated shoot i decided i needed more. Went to evergreen and tried some stuff out.

Tue Feb 26

Had a meeting with Joel about editing the Moonrunners shoot for Time Defeated. We have been having issues trying to find times that work for both of us to edit the footage. Today he told me that i should just edit it myself and show him the finished product. So now i guess that is what i will do. I had been holding off so that we could edit together.

Tues Feb 24

Feeling very inspired today, went to TCTV more or less on a whim. I recently had been cultivating an idea for a Trance TV segment involving foreheads. MY plan was to film as many foreheads i could get, then in Final Cut, superimpose a thought balloon onto their foreheads, then play little thought videos. Eventually the foreheads would start thinking of other foreheads and the camera will zoom into the forehead to the next one. Then there would be a chain of foreheads all flying into each other.

So i went to TCTV and set up a greenscreen in Studio A, then started asking all the people at TCTV if they wanted to be a part of our show, members, staff, freelancers, everyone! Just about everyone i asked said yes, that's the beauty of public access in action! So i filmed them all close up from just above the tops of their heads to their mouths and directed them to make some various faces. Each take lasted about 30 seconds.

Another idea I was able to film that day I had been thinking about since we were working on the first episode. Which is a string of random, unrelated objects placed onto a pedastle in front of a uniformly colored screen. The effect would be slow, but it is intended to make people think: "why am i seeing all these objects?" Anyway, since i had the greenscreen set up I decided to shoot that project as well.

Lastly I started to capture everything. Along with the footage I had shot I also had a tape of footage I had filmed earlier when I was at my dad's house. It was unrelated, but I had promised I would cut it together for him, so i decided to capture it at the same time. As it was capturing i was still playing with the camera and discovered that filming the capturing process created two very unique styles of video, one kind of choppy, from the capture screen, and the other with dots and swirls from the deck monitor. I ended up re-filming almost the entire tape I had gotten from my dad, only to capture it again just a minute later. I love how it looks.

One more thing, the greenscreen this time around was perfect. I kept the people farther away from the screen than usual and the line around their head is crisp. It keys out beautifully. All of this is working so well!

Mon Feb 23

Captured footage from Moonrunners shoot. Unfortunately the audio on the main camera, the one with mics, did not turn out very well. I suspect that the XLR cable for the shotgun mic was faulty. However the camera that I was running got good audio. Both these shots look very nice. The third camera however, seems to have either malfunctioned or just wasn't recording for the first third of the performance. This seems like it might be a bit problematic. Joel wants to meet to edit it together, which is good. I like editing with a little outside direction.

In other news, some of the incidental footage from early on the tape inspired me to work on something for Trance TV. I'm going to create a sound track first, with a haunting but peaceful beginning, then start interupting the peaceful stuff with grating noise. Then I will use the nature footage that i shot as the visuals, hopefully creating a medative nature viewing state at first and then breaking the viewer out of it.

Sun Feb 22

Episode 1 of Time Defeated aired for the first time on TCTV channel 22 at 5pm today.

Sat Feb 21

Filmed Moonrunners for Time Defeated. They played in a tree. 3 camera shoot. Once again used a shotgun mic and an omni. Got lots of good nature footage to mix in and make it more exciting, although it is pretty exciting already.

Fri Feb 20

Recorded Margy Pepper's song Little Cat. Alex and I recorded in my living room. My first experience with music recording. Each part of the song recorded seperately. Alex recorded the tracks and said he will get me a mix as soon as he can.

Mon Feb 16

Met with Time Defeated. Planned Moonrunners shoot. The band had decided they wanted to perform their set in a tree. The would tie their instruments in a tree and we would film them playing from at least 3 different angles. From the ground and from two seperate sides in other surrounding trees. This sounds very exciting.

Thu Feb 12

Met with Margy Pepper today. They are very enthusiastic about making a music video, and brought some good ideas and questions to the table almost immediately. Choosing a song was very easy, they had recently written a new song, Little Cat, and felt that the imagery would lend itself well to a music video. I agreed. We brainstormed about all the different things that we envisioned in the music video. Then we decided, since there was no recording of the song to begin with, we would need to record it. That would be the first next step. Once it's recorded we will storyboard the whole thing with the timecode of the audio track, design a shooting schedule, and shoot it.

My friend and housemate Alex takes classes at Evergreen for audio work just like we needed, so I called him to see if we could work out a time. We planned for a day in the middle of next week, because that was when he was free. In the mean time we will all keep thinking about the music video.

Tue Feb 10

Terrible news! Today it snowed, completely out of nowhere! In fact it snowed so much that they closed TCTV. We can't shoot our footage for Trance TV episode 2. Sean had to call the band from Tacoma and cancel, which apparently worked for them, since they were going to have to drive in it. We had an emergency Trance TV meeting and discussed what to do instead. We talked about many different options, from using the same soundtrack and making new visuals, or even simply playing the same whole show but in reverse (i was desperately opposed to this idea). In the end we decided to make an entirely whole new piece, once again divided between the three of us. We would focus more on live footage, archival footage, and short animation than crazy effects. The audio would either be created on your own or taken from Sean's band Vidooch's album: New Wage, since it fit the feel we were going for.

Fri Feb 6

Trance TV aired for the first time today on TCTV! This is exciting! I got to watch it all the way through and even got some good feedback from my co-workers (I was working at TCTV at the time)

Thu Feb 5

Captured and worked with footage from Monday. It did not work out. Shooting with one camera appears to be a difficult task, and perhaps one i should avoid. However, for each band I filmed i could probably piece together at least one song, using fragments and close-ups from the other songs to create a frankenstein's monster video. Unfortunately the lighting and stage set up make the whole thing look fairly ugly. I think I may just have to count that shoot as a loss and move on.

Tue Feb 3

Trance TV finalizing meeting. Sean, Kenny, and I all met together with our footage. We worked on taking our individual contributions and combining them into one cohesive episode. We mixed some things together, worked on transitions, and made several last minute adjustments to various things. The entire 30 minute episode is definitely something very strange and very experimental. It is pretty exciting to see 3 peoples unique takes on a project all put together. This is like nothing i've seen before, it is not a narrative peice, it is not a talking head show, it is not a county meeting, I honestly think that we've made something very different for TCTV. I am proud to say that if i was flipping through channels, I would stop on this program of ours and be captivated. I love public access.

We planned our next studio shoot, it will be on Tuesday Febuary 10th. Sean has booked a band from Tacoma to play.

Mon Feb 2

With the Sundance Kids video done, and the next Time Defeated band not playing until later in Febuary, I decided to film a show at Evergreen. Mostly it was because Margy Pepper was playing. However from the start there was trouble. I was only able to get one camera for the shoot, but I decided to go through with it anyway and try to make it work. The venue, Evergreen's HCC, was terribly lit with one bright blue light in the center of the stage, a dim yellow light by the window, and several banks of fluorescent all over the ceiling. But once again I decided to make the best of it.

I filmed the whole event, which was a Recycling Awarness deal, which afterwards I decided I will not do again. My ultimate goal is to help talented local bands get better known, but that doesn't mean i can't pick which bands i want to film. Regardless, shooting with one camera presented certain challenges, especially in terms of keeping the shots interesting without making the video unwatchable. The lighting also kept me on the move, since half of each band was lit on a different side, making half the band silhouettes. Anyway, hopefully it all worked out, but I guess we'll see in post.

Thu Jan 29

Finished DVD for the Sundance Kids with Joel today. We designed a menu using some of the footage from the video and it looks very nice. The sleeves that Joel printed are exceptional too, Joel is proving very dependable. We burned off as many copies as we had DVDs and delivered them to the band. Their tour begins on Jan 31st.

Tue Jan 27

With the deadline for Trance TV fast approaching, I made a substantial breakthrough with my footage. The streetlight footage I filmed worked wonderfully, particularly when it is sped up and set for the "difference" composite mode. It makes these moving dots of inverted color fly over the video and looks wonderful. Spent some time making this sync with the music.

I had been going through the Archive.org archives in search of some more meditative films, and found some footage from various psychology and hypnosis info films. I worked bits and pieces of these, particularly the old style title cards, in with a couple of my clips. I think that the overlayed hypnotic commands lend a very humorous air to the piece, so i built a little segment just for them. This is really starting to come together. The more I work on this project the more potential I see in Final Cut. There is so much that you can do! I am feeling very creative.

Sun Jan 25

Today I approached (my favorite) new local band Margy Pepper and asked if they would also like to make a music video. They are freshmen at Evergreen and only formed mid last quarter, but they are already making some very exciting music and are slowly becoming fairly well known in the Olympia music scene. They said that yes they would like to make a music video, they were very enthusiastic, which is think is a good sign. We set up a meeting for February 2nd where we would discuss our ideas and such.

Sat Jan 24

Presented video to Time Defeated and the Sundance Kids. They liked it, no changes need be made. I worked with Seth from Time Defeated to get the video ready to be uploaded onto the internet. He is uploading it to the Time Defeated website, and it will be viewable here:
http://timedefeated.org/
Next step will be turning the tape in to TCTV to be aired.

Also, the Sundance Kids asked if I could make them a DVD of the performance, since they are going on tour soon and would like to sell some copies. I agreed, since part of my whole goal with this contract is to increase the notoriety of local bands, so Joel and I will design a DVD together, burn several copies, and then he will design the sleeve (Joel is a print-maker by hobby).

Wed Jan 21

Finished my work on the Sundance Kids performance for Time Defeated. Gained some very good insights into efficient color correcting with Final Cut. Earlier I had been having some difficulty matching the colors in each shot, so I did some research and looked at various tutorials and devised a very helpful method. Using some of the window commands, a vectorscope, several frame viewer tools, and a second monitor, I was able to finish the color correcting very nicely. Then using the templates we had designed on the 11th, I created the opening titles and synced them with the first song. Finally I made the credits and it is ready for them to take a look at.

I am excited to show them the finished work, I think it is well done. I really feel that already I have learned so many new techniques for editing video. Each time I work on Trance TV or on this Time Defeated project I gain a better understanding of Final Cut and of video making (particulalry in terms of audio related media) as a whole. These projects are very different from the things I'm used to doing at my internship for TCTV, and it feels good to stretch like this.

Sun Jan 18

Meeting with Jenny Jenkins in Portland. We met and discussed the music video project I had approached her about earlier. She immediately said that we should use a song from her most recent album, since it was studio produced and is really good quality. So we made a list of all the songs on the album and listened to the ones we thought would be promising. Out of the 17 songs we decided that 6 of them would make good music videos and brainstormed a couple ideas for each one. We talked about our schedules and how we would need to finish the principle shooting before Jenny went on tour in early Febuary. We decided to each take some more listens to the songs we'd chosen and make our decision when she returned to Olympia.

Thu Jan 15

I am finding the footage for Trance TV to be overwhelming. The key on the greenscreen worked nicely, but i am having a bit of trouble deciding where to start. I have been using some footage from old projects as backgrounds and am playing with colors and found, public domain footage from Archive.org. I met with Sean to see what he has been doing and he taught me about composite modes in Final Cut. This will be instrumental in combining footage for the pseudo-psychedelic effect we are aiming for.

Tue Jan 13

We filmed Trance TV at the studio at TCTV in front of the greenscreen. All three of us brought our music equipment and made some very interesting music. Sean ran all the audio through a mixer to keep the levels even and to record it, as a precautionary measure, however, we set up an omni mic in front of the greenscreen. Chandra ran the mobile camera.

The music was made up of Sean playing guitar and doing vocals, Kenny making noise by looping audio with various equipment i don't really understand, and me playing bass with several effects pedals. We also had a Groovebox, a machine that creates beats and sounds, that Jahla was running to fill out the sound scape. We made sure to dance around and do lots of crazy stuff so that we could get a good visual from the performance.

Afterwards we made use of the greenscreen and shot some dancing and other various things that we would use when editing the piece together. We departed to Sean's house and captured the footage. It looked great, especially the mobile camera, this should be a very exciting project. We distributed a copy of the footage to each person to edit.

Sun Jan 11

Met with Time Defeated and Shelby Turner, the leader of the Sundance kids, to review and edit the footage. I brought my computer and showed them the footage. We almost immediately that we would use the second take exclusively, so i layered the two takes in a Final Cut Pro sequence and synced them up. Then, using the mobile camera as the principle shot, went through the entire performance with them, showing them the different angles and editing the footage as they suggested. After a couple run throughs we had a rough cut that everyone was happy with. The band left so Joel and I worked on the intro titles and the ending. We designed template text for the intro using Photoshop and made the ending graphic. I will take the now edited footage, fine tune it, balance the colors (the two shots, although color balanced at the beginning, fell out of sync because of the constantly changing lighting), and complete the titling.

The picture above is the credits we wrote down to add into the intro and ending.

Sat Jan 10

Today Sean, Kenny, and I met for a Trance TV meeting. We discussed the shoot on Tuesday. We will film with two cameras, one stationary and one mobile. The three of us will each bring instruments to play in order to create a sound track for the episode. We will play the music in front of a greenscreen so we can use the performance as footage. It was decided that each of us would be responsible for 10 minutes of edited footage for the completed episode, or 1/3 of the total footage each.

Fri Jan 9

Arrived at the Finger Complex to film the shoot. Made a couple last minute adjustments. I had decided i would experiment with a couple techniques, namely playing with the focus. Occasionally when I would move the camera i would pull it our of focus, then when i had framed up the next shot, I would pull it back into focus. The filming would be intentionally jerky, to try and match the energy of the performance. For audio i brought a shotgun mic and an omni directional mic i checked out from TCTV.

I filmed the band, and Joel, from Time Defeated ran the lights. We filmed the entire set, then decided that both I and the band would like to do one more take, since they had made some mistakes and i had started to get more familiar with the style i was trying to shoot in. The second take went very well, all the cues were hit on time, the reveal went smoothly, and the band performed very well. We decided to wrap it up, and will meet in a couple of days to edit the footage together. I went home and immediately captured the footage.

Thu Jan 8

Met with Sundance Kids and Time Defeated crew at the venue, The Finger Complex, to set up venue. We moved furniture around, attached a sheet in front of the organ for the reveal, numbered the strands of christmas lights, and mapped out when each strand would be plugged in. Then I worked with them to place the cameras, it will be a two camera shoot, and then shot some test shots. The first camera will be placed just outside the main room and will film the entire band, the second camera will be hand held and stationed in between all the christmas lights. I will run this camera and get close up shots of the band members. We left the room set up and the cameras placed.

Wed Jan 7

Met with the Sundance Kids and Time Defeated crew, finalized shooting plans for shoot on the 9th. The Sundance Kids described what they wanted for the video, starting completely dark, then as they played their set the stage would be lit incrementally by strings of christmas lights. Each new strand of lights would be turned on at a specific point in each song. All the strands of lights would be held by the "audience,' people sitting and standing behind the band. The set would start out with just one member of the band playing, and then, with each new song, another member of the band would join in. At the climax of the last song there would be a reveal of the last member of the band playing the organ, then the camera would resolve on a close up of the organist.