I spent my monday evening recording four accompaniment tracks for Kurt Weill’s Three Penny Opera for the Theater class at the high school. The music was a lot harder than I thought and it took way more time than I would have liked. I’m uploading these just so you can see how I spent my monday night. I wouldn’t say this is the pinnacle of my piano playing, but dammit… i spent a lot of time on it!
Alrighty, this is the last one I’m doing, so it’s time to compile the portfolio! So that’s what i’ll spend this week doing. Meanwhile, here’s the last spot, another 10 second one for FlyColumbus.com. I feel like it really needs a voiceover to sell the spot, but I have no script. Otherwise I’d get Martin over here and we’d lay down a voice track like Mr. Movie-voice is still alive.
I decided to go acoustic on this one to show that I can write stuff sans-synthesizer too. There’s plenty of applications for music like this out there, so… yeah!
Once again, Youtube cut off some of the video. Try the HQ version for the full ending…!
::edit:: I guess there is no HQ version? Well, the real thing will be in my portfolio reel, so you can wait ’til then to hear that last chord!
I borrowed Matt’s digital camera. I have this adapter that lets me put the lenses I’ve been using on my camcorder onto the newer EOS body Canon cameras. This is what I took. Didn’t process them at all, but not too bad!
So I found a couple of completed aston martin commercials using the same footage I drew mine from. The first one is another short one, but the second one is the full length video I snagged my shots from.
I don’t think the first one is a legit commercial, but I’m willing to wager the second one is. So you can A/B compare these videos with the one I did, and see if it holds up. Let me know what you decide.
Alright, now up is a 30 second Aston Martin spot. Just like the sci fi one, it took me 2 nights to do this. One night for music, one night for sound design. This time I started with sound design.
It took a while to find all the sounds… especially ’cause I have no clue what an Aston Martin DBS sounds like. I imagine it’s got a nice big engine. Anyway, the only sounds I could find were of a Toyota Matrix and a Honda Civic. I pitch shifted the engine sounds lower so that it sounded bigger and meaner. Then I took some audio of cars passing in the street and time-shifted them to match the swooshing.
The music was interesting too. I really wasn’t sure which direction to go with it. I auditioned it with just a drum beat and it was pretty cool too, but I decided in the end to keep the electronic instruments in also. If I were really doing it for a client, I guess I’d send them multiple versions to mull over. In this case, you guys get to hear this one. Almost done w/ the portfolio, just one more thing to do, then compile the portfolio itself!
Here’s another spot that didn’t have audio that I made some stuff to. It’s TOUGH to write for a 10 second spot! At least with the sci fi stuff I had enough time to get an entire melodic idea down with call and response and all that good stuff.
This time, well, i decided to try a more percussive thing, sans-melody. I dunno! I think it worked out okay, but I don’t think it sits as well with me as the sci fi spot did.
Also, it seems youtube cut off the last little bit of the video, so you can’t really see how the Adidas logo pops up when the last kick drum hits… but it does, I swear.
So I was viewing the webalizer stats for my blog, to see how many people were viewing my blog (not very many) and how they got here. Most of them were through direct links or RSS feeds (presumably from my status message and whatnot), but there were a couple that were through Google Searches. There were a few that I expected, such as “Jag35 Test” or “Ben Powell.”
One of the other search strings was “doggie POV” which brought up my “doggie POV” post. Then I thought about it… if you were to type in Doggie POV into google, what search results would actually come up…?