Episode 4 ushers in the audio unit and was a chance to take advantage of D’Arcy Norman’s visit the week before. We wanted to do cameo’s where possible. And we wanted to make use of a lot of sound.
We had so much material (plus extra footage Jon Fulton did during our green screen sessions) that we have outtakes!
The idea for the opening links to the premiere episode where Brian mentioned that his band could record some music.
Since the music was going to be “metal” for the opening logo, I played around in Photoshop with a tutorial on creating chrome effects:
Our voice over the logo then transitions into the clip of the band with the logo on top in a cut away channel. Again, by doing this top layer as a transparent PNG, I lose any kind of box shape around the graphic– and, as I found out, I can set its opacity so we see through it.
This is not made up; since Brian invited me to weekly jams with the “Breaking Band” and we had one planned for D’Arcy’s first night here. I asked them to do the hard rocking way loud, terrible You Show song- that could not have been better, and it was totally improvised. D’Arcy was doing the video with my iPhone; you can see me point back to Brian and the zoom in on Brian was key.
That clip worked great. We then had a set up where D’Arcy would shake his head and say “Let me show you how it’s done” and holding an electric guitar, pantomiming the lead while Matt, another guitarist played the real music.
The only problem was the cameraman (me). I did that off sync thing where I thought the camera was on, and when the sequence started I turned it off, and when it ended, turned it back on. So that clip was gone.
That worked to our advantage, because I got the idea later in the week to do the green screen at the end of our Thursday Open Studio hours in the Innovation Lab. Jon Fulton again set us up with the green screen.
Harry stepped in first to do a bit of air guitar to help me frame the shot and that made for a fun clip before the last credits.
The green screen of D’Arcy sites in the upper video channel, set to green screen mode. The clip I used for the background was a YouTube demo of laser lights, 3rd Place International Award Laser Show – Arrived In Flames (2014 ILDA Artistic Award). I first searched for video of bands with stage shows, but recommended clips pointed me to these collections of laser light show videos. I just used the video and muted its audio.
The guitar track was recorded by Irwin Devries (also part of breaking band); he just sent me back a track like 2 hours after I emailed him a request. I’s called “Green Screen of Death”
The first rush of the group of D’Arcy fans did not work since they barely entered the frame of my iPad, so that took a second shot- I had to tell them to rush up and touch him.
D’Arcy was patient with my demands 😉 That whole part took less than 30 minutes to record.
I dashed off a script Saturday and sent to Brian (see the Google Doc Episode 4 script). We both agree that we do better w/o exact lines, just the highlights of what we want to cover. It’s fun when one of us throws in a surprise line (Brian’s quip about cribbage).
Part of the “evolution” of the characters is that as the on stage Brian and Alan get more proficient, the back stage techies have less and less to do.
I thought it worked for the audio unit, and would be less video work, if we set it up so the screen went dark and most of the middle was conversational. We recorded just bits of the suggested ideas where we talk about the possibility of audio. Brian and I did a hike on Saturday (it was gorgeous out) and we recorded the walking sounds and experimented with his new fancy audio rig.
We did go downtown to Value Village (thrift store) and Kamloops Inn (thats the bar noise).
The part where we talk through audio only looks like a mess, but it was pretty easy to edit by splitting clips, and tossing in other tracks. iMovie lets you layer at least 4 tracks of audio (not sure what limit there is). I thought at first to have the screen pitch black, but then decided to toss the laser lights in again. By putting a black screen in the main track, the lasers in the upper track could be set to be about 20% opacity, pretty dim.
In addition to our recorded sounds, I pulled a lot of effects and sounds in from the audio library that comes with iMovie (loons, monkeys, doors closing, eerie machines, impact sounds). The top audio track is Brian and I talking, and most things below are added sounds.
We decided in recorded to act like we stayed there. It was a late night idea, after recording the video, that it should be the tech guys who add one last bit of flare- that last bit of Brian’s voice was actually recorded at his door as I was leaving. And I threw the last call to the tech guys just when editing the movie, recording directly into iMovie (the knocking sound is me tapping the mic).
It seemed fun to have the last bit of Harry’s guitar act. Since he is a huge fan of Tim and Eric’s Totino Boy Brian did some Garage Band magic Sunday night to mix in Harry’s voice with the “punk bass” audio from that episode.
And for the closing credits, I added in some small outtake video clips as tiny overlays- this is the picture in picture effect.
Like the previous ones, this video just came together so well from really mostly single takes.
How much more fun can we have?