The year 2011 has been a year of strings for me. It started with the Section Quartet, via Pandora, and a whole slew of others (such as the Vitamin String Quartet) on Pandora stations. More recently, I’ve been playing the Break of Reality album “Spectrum of the Sky” a lot. A blog I follow pointed me to Zoe Keating’s amazing cello layering using a loop recorder. Finally, this week I saw these guys on The Colbert Report, went and bought The Goat Rodeo Sessions, and have been playing it since.
Not just strings either. But instrumental music in general has been on the rise in my playlist. Explosions in The Sky is the first to come to mind.
My new musical discovery: The aptly named Explosions in the Sky. I’ve only listened to one album so far, The Earth is not a Cold Dead Place. Love it. Epic rock instrumentals.
While surfing the interwebs tonight, I came across a silly stop-motion video about, well, stop-motion. My first thought was, “That must take freakin’ forever!”. Or does it? How hard is it really? Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to try my own stop motion animation. I really didn’t want to mess with clay characters, or a plot, or a little set. I just wanted to try moving some letters around. So, here it is below (or view it on flickr):
The first thing I did was start cutting paper letters. Actually, I cut one letter. Then I said to hell with this, and set off trying to find a quicker path to forming words. Scrabble! Perfect. I have a letter set right here.
So I put up the camera, a flash, and pointed it at a black foam board. First lesson: Don’t use a flash, if you can help it. The flash can only cycle so fast, and this limits the rate you can take pictures. I could move things faster than the camera could take photos.
Second lesson: Check your exposure, ON A COMPUTER SCREEN, before you capture the entire scene. I got fooled by the camera LCD into dramatically underexposing. This just meant I had to correct all the shots later.
Third lesson: Set the camera resolution to something lower. You don’t need 12MP images to create a 640×480 video. Everything goes slower with the larger file, so just shrink it down from the beginning.
Fourth lesson: You really do need small movements. My video is jerky as hell. Downright amateurish. I guess I wasn’t patient enough, but I didn’t really have a good feel for how small motions needed to be. Also, I guess I could have made the text a little straighter. And, all of the “letter flying in” frames for the top row failed miserably, because the letters were off the top of the screen.
I cannot imagine doing a full-length stop-motion film, but a few minutes really isn’t that bad. It is strangely satisfying. In fact, I spent a lot more time and got a lot more frustrated with the editing of this clip than I did with the shooting. A lot of that frustration was just figuring out how to do it though, and would go a lot faster on the second try.
iMovie is crap. A pain to use, and it would not let an image in a slideshow have a duration less than 0.3seconds. Further evidence that there is just no reason to use MacOS. I ended up using two things: VirtualDub to piece the still frames together, and Windows Movie Maker for the final editing, adding the end credits, and overlaying audio. It was a somewhat tedious process getting the still images all ready, but virtual dub will quickly take a sequence of numbered JPEGs and combine them to a movie. Irfanview came in very handy for generating these numbered sequence. For example, if I wanted to repeat a frame, say IMG_0527.jpg, I would create copies named IMG_0527_2.jpg, IMG_0527_3.jpg, etc, and then use irfranview to batch rename these into take2_1, take2_2, etc. so that VirtualDub would read them correctly.
The next problem I hit was the sound effects. I used my Blackberry to record the scrabble pieces splashing across a table, and the file was a .amr file format. wtfmate? A little googling, and I found the Moble AMR Converter on free-codecs.com. OK, so now I have a wav file. BUT, Windows Movie Maker won’t allow multiple audio tracks, and I’ve already used the audio track for the music. For this, I had to encode the movie without sound effects (just music), then open that video and add the sound effects in a new project and re-encode the final cut. Easy enough.
Total camera time: ~80 minutes.
Total editing time: ~150 minutes.
Total animation length: ~90 seconds (and the second half isn’t really stop-motion at all, so really ~40 seconds)
Production minutes per animation minute: ~350
That was fun! Now it is quite late, and I should probably get some sleep.
One of the best songs ever recorded. When the bridge kicks in, with that simple, repetitive guitar riff that should be boring as hell in no time, I can’t help but crank it up. Then the drums pick up…I’m blown away every time. It moves me in an inexplicable way. I guess I’m kind of a sucker for that kind of emotional swell.
Azure Ray, is a 9-year old duo, recently re-formed, and just recently discovered by me, which I’m enjoying very much. Can’t remember if it was KCRW or Pandora that led me to them. All three are awesome.
Looking for some good streaming music? I’ve recently discovered Pandora, where I can enter a few artists or song and create a “station” that will play a set of songs similar to the ones I’ve entered. I’ve been impressed. I’ve heard a lot of good music, some from artists I’ve never heard of, and they do a remarkable job of determining what is “similar”. And, it’s free (like I’d pay!).
On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.
Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.
Since we started back in 2000, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.
I’ve discovered a radio show on KCRW since moving here that plays some really great music, and regularly has bands in to do a live set. Sometimes it is people I’ve heard of, sometimes something completely new, but usually good. It is called Morning Becomes Eclectic, hosted by Nic Harcourt. They have broadcasts available on the website, or a few of the live shows are available as podcasts on iTunes. I’m currently enjoying some West Indian Girl because they were on the show recently. It is so nice to have radio that isn’t completely commercial junk.
It is not exactly reliable, but at least one poll puts the average price paid for In Rainbows downloads at 4 pounds, with a third of users not paying anything. This is, according to here and here, from a poll of 3000+ people conducted by Record of the Week newsletter. Of course, this is self-reported data, as anonymous as it may be . But none the less, that’s pretty high. Paying $8 when it could have been free…I’m surprised. I suspect none of the members of the band are hurting for cash given their past sucess, but it’s a cool thing to do and I’m glad it seems to have proved successful. They’ve probably reached a wider audience, ditched the record companies, and still made good money on the album.
Radiohead released a new album, “In Rainbows” yesterday. At the moment it is only available for download from their website. Which, by the way, is…different. Not a lot of info. Very funky colors. When you try to buy your download, there is a blank textbox where the price should be. When you click the question mark next to it, it says “It’s up to you”. You decide how much to pay for the album. The only catch is the 0.45 GBP (about $1) processing fee. But, I think you can get the album for anywhere from $1 to $200. I’d be very interested in seeing what people choose to pay.
Oh…and I’m liking the album too. Go get it. And give them at least a couple quid .
. But none the less, that’s pretty high. Paying $8 when it could have been free…I’m surprised. I suspect none of the members of the band are hurting for cash given their past sucess, but it’s a cool thing to do and I’m glad it seems to have proved successful. They’ve probably reached a wider audience, ditched the record companies, and still made good money on the album.
