Blood From A Stone

Is it only because I have now not had to get up at six a.m. every day that I feel relatively human? That some ideas are appearing of their own concorde? Whatever, it does feel something like coming out of a spiritual tunnel. It was a very good year, as the toupeed singer used to croon, but it was exhausting, too.
The last two weeks, Will and myself have been tackling the videos of 'Frankie'. Generally I hate pop videos, unless they are by Michel Gondry. And we had to do these with a wilful minimum of equipment or preparation. Some comments then, and one day soon i will find a way to stream the pieces, so you don't have to take my word.
These are concert films - i.e. we are more or less filming live and trying to make an interesting visual document out of that. The conditions are not an excuse for being shoddy, they are a deliberate gamble or putting ourselves on the line to see if we can - in the maxim of Robert Bresson (who to my knowledge never actually made a pop video) - 'create with the minimum'. I'll look up the actual quote from 'Notes sur le cinematographe' for a later post. So, not DOGME, but really just using what we (or anyone) have. A camera, a performance, and an edit deck.
My own wish is to capture the energy and flow of a performance. I know this means embracing the rough edges, and i am a little worried that the musicians (all musicians) rightly worry about appearing sloppy or less than studio 'crystal clear'. And, remember, bands NEVER see/hear themselves in concert, so it can be a shock that the 'blinding gig' which everyone agrees about, actually had a few bum notes or slack moments. Pheromones. I not only think this doesn't matter, I think it's the essence of a performance.Can we capture it on video?
The first rule would be not to interfere with the band. To work around them. this is a pain in the arse, if you have any scruples, but actually, the concrete effect is to remove all prudishness and make the camerapersons part of the gig. You dance with the music, and get up on stage, move around, and oddly, if you are riding the same wave, do not intrude at all on the musicians.
The opposite would be stopping and starting to 'control' the lighting, or make the band repeat small sections again and again. So here are some performance notes on the three vids we shot over two gigs.
'Kudos' was so impromptu (30 minutes notice!) that we only had one uncharged camera and one still camera. So that's what we used. It took place on a parking lot, under a yellow and white marquee with no sides, between rainstorms. We kept the live sound, which is a bit distorted, but not too muddied as there was no reflection (no walls). The images were cut up and interlarded with stills. I tried to get away from lip-synch (a, cos it's hard and b, cos it's banal) but it is oddly unsatisfying to always cut randomly off the beat, and sometimes - especially with stills - rhythmic cutting on the beat just feels good. There are a lot of short treated images too, generally I push the tone curve to heighten contrast and aim for decent blacks and saturation, and this seems to give a warmer feel to the whole.
Will went hogwild on split screen with 'Vinkermichael' and probably spent 30 hours on this 2 minute song. See where the sharp end of video is? I think his clip is remarkable, as evidenced by the two split-screen photos here.
This took place in an unbelievably boomy church hall, and there were no monitors. As sometimes happens, the resonant frequency of the room (hard walls, wooden floor) was pitched exactly in the singer's mid voice range, and the A,D and G strings of the guitar. The bass notes and drums echoed and removed any crispness, though the massed dancing bodies absorbed a lot of that. Really, Frankie must have been singing through his skull. A rotten acoustic, but we used it. However, enough is enough, so on the next one, I used a clean feed (studio demo from a month earlier) provided by the band. An inevitable (well, it IS evitable if you straightjacket the band and get them to mime, but you know, I don't do mime) is that the tempo varies between takes. Which means you cannot cut different takes together i n v i s i b l y . As if you'd want to! Pheromones again. So various pardonable (I hope) tricks have to be used to give the illusion that there's a continuous performance here. There is not. It's one studio sound. Two takes of the song from two cameras. Some pieces used in literal synch, others tweaked or displaced to appear in synch. If you look closely you will see that sometimes the drum pattern - though in beat - is not from the same part of the song. Then again, hopefully it doesn't matter, because the energy takes you past the mechanical. Also 'Jargow Jig' was me trying to get away from the black background, use a bit of multiple imagery (not too much) and integrate some non-concert element into the video. A week before the gig, I asked two people to do a dance sequence (one being Lewis Jargow, after whom the song is named, t'other being Emily, Lewis' companion). Haha, the shoot of that caused many raised eyebrows, because - yes - it was sexy. It was also fun. God, Americans! I mean, it's just a young couple dancing, fer Xsakes... We cut together a mute image track and projected it over Frank and Sammi while they played the song. Did it twice. Then I cut bits of the performances - the most interesting image-wise, more or less in time with the music (taken from a 'clean' demo track) and interspersed these concert shots with clips of Lewis and Emily dancing to the song (actually they were dancing to 5/4 by Gorillaz...). I used a lot of vignetted images and set them all against a white matte, not the usual black. I think it works. But it is a bugger doing all these little layers. As David Walliams might put it...'Computer says 'nah''.
I had one lovely sequence with a row of eight little Emilys dancing on top of the image you see above - the split screen strip - but as she's wearing a stripy French matelot T-shirt, it moired. Bugger. Which means the stripes are unresolvable by the screen and appear to float, wobble and shimmer. Actually it's a nice effect if just a little larger. Film doesn't do that...
So, after three weeks, we have three videos, lasting about seven minutes. They are all simple in effect, and were straightforward in execution, just getting from A to C involved a lot of digging, unpicking and redoing in stage B.
I handed Frank and Sammi a test dvd yesterday. I really hope they like it. News will follow.
The title of the post, btw, refers to the difficulty in getting or preserving life even through hours and hours of processing. I think Monsieur Bresson had something to say on that subject, too.