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.