(Also known as “I’m Henry IV I Am” and “Music Video, Part I”.)

Back in February of 2007 my children Sam and Arthur performed in the AFE/A Catch of Shadows production of Shakespeare’s history play “Henry IV, Part I” (as the title character and Bardolph respectively), and I of course filmed it.

Now take the WABAC machine forward a few months to early June, when we were bemoaning not having a video to submit to the annual AFE Follywood festival of short student and family films (then fast-approaching on June 16), despite having this great play footage and having made music videos for two other plays in previous years.

I thought of the 1965 Herman’s Hermits hit “I’m Henry VIII, I Am”, played it for Sam and Arthur, and then Sam really ran with it — writing the alternate “Henry IV” lyrics, making a storyboard matching up some scenes from the play with specific moments in the lyrics, even creating a “BAM!” graphic to appear when Prince Hal punches Hotspur.

I used the bathroom as a recording studio, and my camcorder to record the audio of Sam singing the new lyrics (while listening to the original song on headphones), and then Arthur singing the backup vocals. I downloaded a karaoke track of “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” and imported that into my Sony Vegas editing software along with Sam and Arthur’s vocal tracks.

We went to a performance of “Chocolate” — a version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” with outstanding original rap songs and starring some of my children’s friends — where afterward Sam filmed some footage of some of the cast and crew goofing around on the set, to be used during instrumental breaks and some other key moments in our music video.

I finished editing the Henry IV, Part I, music video at 2am on June 10, and six days later it was a hit at Follywood.

Man, I need to get back to making more music videos — those were the days!

I started writing lyrics for an “It Gets Better” music video more than a year ago but unfortunately still haven’t actually finished them.

My little point-and-shoot digital still camera is an important part of my filmmaking. When I’m filming a play or other event, before it starts I’ll walk around taking candid photos of the cast and crew, posters, marquee, auditorium, ticket booth/sellers, refreshments — all the extra and otherwise-ephemeral details that help to recreate the experience of having been right there when it happened. Often I’ll use these photos in my DVD design — as backgrounds for the main menu, chapter-selection menus, the credits roll, a special-features slideshow, some Ken Burns-style panning and zooming, and/or for the printed graphics on the DVDs themselves — and I also like to include them in the flickr photosets I sometimes make about the productions/events I film and produce DVDs of.

For that matter, when I was asked to make a video in honor of retiring consultant-teacher Meg Brown for the 2007 AFE Follywood festival of short student/family films, I did it using nothing but still photos — half taken by me and half by Dorothee Ledbetter — from Meg’s June 2 2007 beach bonfire retirement party, set to music by Meg’s good friend Joya Winwood.

As shown above, my digital still camera is a Sony DSC-P10 that I got in October of 2003, so it actually predates my camcorder by four months. There’s a funny story about how it physically made its way to my house, which I’ll include at the end of this posting, but first I’ll explain how I chose it from the vast ocean of digital cameras:

• Having been happy with Sony products since the days when the Walkman was the latest and greatest gadget, OK, it was going to be a Sony. Plenty of other manufacturers may be just as good or better, and since then Sony has unfortunately gone over to the DRM dark side, but whether reasonably or frivolously this definitely did narrow the field to a manageable size.
• I wanted 5 megapixels. These days this is pretty much a laughable minumum, but at the time it was basically top of the line as far as affordable consumer cameras went. And although megapixel numbers keep getting higher as each year goes by, for the majority of people 5 megapixels is plenty — at that resolution the photos are large enough for most uses, but small enough not to really bog things down in terms of storage and bandwidth.
• I wanted a viewfinder in addition to an LCD screen. Viewfinders are getting less and less common these days, but I’m much more comfortable framing an image by looking through the viewfinder than I am trying to make out what’s on the LCD screen in extremes of bright sunlight or murky darkness.
• I wanted it to support taking movies as well as still photos. This has some relevance for filmmaking in addition to just short wizard-pictures-style vignettes, because with plays and other live events there will always be times when suddenly there’s some really great behind/before/after-the-scenes action going on that you want to include in your movie, but your camcorder is not set up yet, in a different room, etc. (Though actually the DSC-P10′s implementation of this is the one thing I’ve not been totally happy with about it — its “VX” mode MPEG is only 16 frames a second, which just does not play nicely with my Sony Vegas software despite being fine for uploading short one-shots to YouTube or Flickr.)
• I wanted a rechargeable battery. I’ve got the charger on my desk, so that whenever I plug in the USB cable to copy photos to one of my computers I just plug in the charger cable as well — about as minimum fuss as possible, as opposed to one of my children’s cameras which just eats AA batteries like crazy (and for that matter, four AA batteries plus four spares add a lot to the size and weight of a camera and camera case).

These days people generally take little digital cameras (including cell phone cameras) for granted as they should, but for someone who had grown up with film cameras, getting my digital camera really changed my life. It was such a revolution for photography to go from a rationed activity requiring regular doses of $$$ and waiting both before and after each lot of 24 or 36 exposures, to being able to take as many pictures as I wanted to at no added cost and immediately upload them to the computer.

For anyone who remembers the bit in Erma Bombeck’s “I’ve Always Loved You Best” column about the youngest child’s baby book being “barren but for a recipe for graham cracker pie crust that someone jammed between the pages”, well, the ever-increasing availability and cultural penetration of low-cost digital cameras have really turned that on its head — these days, the further-down-the-line-in-terms-of-birth-order the child, the more-photographed their day-to-day journeys and joys.

In addition to providing a rich record of family life and other personal adventures and interests, my camera has turned me into the designated photographer for all sorts of events and parties and yearbook pages and the like simply because I’m known as someone who always has her camera with her. As Neil Gaiman has often said about writing, “it really is 90% just showing up and doing the work, and doing it as well as you can”.

And to elaborate a little more on the “parties” part, as I recently commented on a friend’s blog posting, “Being a person who usually spends most of a party either following the kids around or sitting in a corner reading a book, having my little camera with me all the time both expands the menu of activities I feel most comfortable with and gets me thanked for documenting the goings on.”

And so, my digital camera happiness having now passed the seven-year mark, truly geologic time as far as consumer electronics are concerned, am I wanting to replace my camera as soon as possible with this year’s hot model? No, not really — I won’t say that newer cameras don’t sound pretty amazing and appealing, with improved low-light performance, larger sensors and LCD screens, HD video, increased speed and optical zoom, etc., but my camera is still going strong and still better than any film camera I ever had.

One funny thing about the march of time and my camera is that its curved, rounded contours and larger size (which in 2003 was considered quite compact!) compared to today’s very thin, flat, and squared-off point-and-shoot cameras have led some people to think not “that camera is seven years old — totally ancient!” but rather “that must be one fancy feature-packed camera!”.

If I had huge tracts of $$$, my fantasy camera of the moment would be not only packed with all the latest, top-of-the-line features, but also built into a medieval-style gauntlet/bracer, with the lens on the outside/back of my wrist and the LCD screen and controls on the inside, so it’d be right there and ready to go any time I was out and about, needing only a bit of dramatic swish and flick to aim and shoot.

And now, as mentioned above, here’s the story of how my camera both didn’t and did make it to my house, as I had written it up on the night of October 9, 2003:

An <insert bizarre word of choice> yet true story

Early this afternoon Sam and Arthur and I were talking about playing the game Apples to Apples with [a certain friend], but as I’d forgotten that she had to run off to an appointment, it didn’t happen.

On Sunday I’d posted about having finally gotten around to picking and ordering (from the dreaded amazon.com, oh well) a digital camera. Well, when I checked the UPS tracking page this morning I saw that the package had already made it to Santa Cruz, so one thing that *did* happen early this afternoon was a UPS guy handing me a package. But I didn’t open it right away — having gotten two lectures on priorities from my boss during the last week (eep!), I thought I should get some more programming done before I did any camera playing around.

Eventually I came to a good stopping point about 45 minutes before the time I’d be walking over to Sam’s art class with him, so I decided to have a couple bowls of rice and lentils, make sure the camera was basically operational, and take it and its manual along with me to try/read while Sam was in his class.

Rice and lentils: check.

Camera: I opened the shipping box, pulled out the packing materials, pulled out the receipt, reached for the box that had been underneath the receipt, and stopped. It was a shrinkwrapped Apples to Apples box. I felt very uneasy, but, well, OK, I supposed there was a remote chance that *maybe* they had reused such a box to pack the camera in. Already having “my word against theirs” visions involving large amounts of money jabbing around in my brain, I had a strong feeling that I did *not* want to undo the shrinkwrapping on the Apples to Apples box unless I was sure a camera had gotten inside, so I got down our set for comparison. They seemed to weigh about the same, and as I tilted the new box one way and then the other I’d say I could definitely hear the sound of racks of cards shifting back and forth.

Well *shit*. Does someone in one of Amazon’s warehouses have a racket of stealing high-ticket goodies by pocketing them and sticking some other handy items into the boxes instead? Will Amazon send me out a new camera right away or are they going to balk and think I’m totally making this up to try to get a free camera?

Usually going to and from Sam’s art class makes for a pleasant walk and conversation, but I fear that tonight I spent way too much time muttering about cameras.

As Sam went into the classroom I sat down and started reading a book I’d picked up at the library last night — “Lost in a Good Book“, sequel to “The Eyre Affair“. Oh my. I don’t think it should really give away any plot secrets to mention that when coincidences start happening it means something bad is afoot, and that the early warning system for coincidences starting to happen consists of … rice and lentils.

I’m not looking forward to having to deal with Amazon about this, but as when I just flipped up the top of the shipping box I saw that the Apples to Apples box had somehow not magically changed into a camera box while we were out, I guess that’s next on the agenda. <insert frustration word or sound of choice here>

Luckily, the next morning I got mail back from Amazon saying that they were sending me a camera right away, no problem. And so they did, and I’ve been getting a lot of use out of my Sony DSC-P10 — many tens of thousands of photos — ever since!

March 2010 is DIY Movie Making Month at Make Magazine Online. To quote from the introduction:

There are so many incredible tools now available to consumers with even the most modest budgets to create shockingly sophisticated videos, from viral YouTube prank vids to animation/claymation/stopmotion wonders to satisfying sci-fi fan films to serious low-budget feature fare that give Hollywood a run for its money. Over the coming month, we’ll be rounding up site content on various aspects of DIY movie production, recommending tools for movie making, talking to some of our favorite no-budget/low-budget filmmakers, showing you some of our video-making process here at Maker Media, and more.

I thought I’d also mention two magazines about digital filmmaking which you can either read online or fill out their subscription forms to receive free print subscriptions in the mail:

DV – Digital Video Magazine bills itself as “Tools & Technology for Video Professionals”, and the kinds of top- of-the-line software and hardware packages they cover will definitely make your eyes pop. While their feature articles and reviews give fascinating behind-the-scenes details of the kind of cutting-edge digital filmmaking used in today’s blockbuster films and other higher-budget media, their online forums also contain plenty of information for and by home filmmakers.

Creative COW Magazine gets some laughs when people see the title and cow-head logo, but it’s actually very cool: The “COW” stands for “Communities of the World”, and their very active and extensive community forums have been useful to me in figuring out some of the quirks of my Sony Vegas software, among other things. In addition to a forum for high-paying professional job listings they also have a forum listing low or no-pay jobs that may interest people who are just starting out. Although the magazine bills itself as “The Magazine for media professionals working in video, film, audio, motion graphics, imaging & design”, the articles and personal stories are written in a way that is accessible to all levels. And to quote a blurb for the web site, “Thousands of free video tutorials, web tutorials, project files, user reviews, and features to take your skills to the next level. Yes, free.”

Enjoy!

Lords of the Trampoline was the third film/DVD project I completed, back in April of 2004. I had recently read The Little Digital Video Book (more about which I shall say in a later posting), which was big on music videos as the ideal beginner project, and so, as I wrote at the time:

Yesterday when Sam and Arthur and some friends were jumping on the trampoline I set up the digital camcorder (which I should write some other things about) on the tripod and just let it film for an hour, occasionally moving it to different parts of the yard for different angles. Then I started chopping up interesting bits of the footage to make a music video to send to relatives and so on. I feel like more of a powertripping egomaniac than ever, it’s great!

Originally I didn’t have any song at all in mind for the music video, but when Chris started intoning “One ball to rule them all”, and Arthur and Julian were playing with giant rings (OK, hula hoops), then Lords of the Rhymes (which had been getting a fair amount of play at my house back then) became the obvious choice.

After I filled up the mini-DV tape, loaded it onto my computer, and started to edit the footage, the first thing I noticed was that the trampoline-dodgeball parts did not make for the most interesting scenes, as when playing trampoline dodgeball most of the time is spent standing around doing nothing — the person on the ground with the ball waits for a good moment to throw it, and the people on the trampoline wait for it to be thrown so they can dodge it. Anyway, I repeatedly went through the footage looking first for bits somehow relevant to the theme or the lyrics, and afterward just for bits of interesting action of one sort or another, and began matching them up to particular points in the music as if I were assembling a jigsaw puzzle.

Another idea I used when deciding where/when to use which bits of footage was to roughly assign characters to the jumpers, for example Sam was Sam and Aragorn, Chris Quickbeam, Arthur Tom Bombadil and Gollum, Julian Bilbo and Merry — I didn’t always organize things this way, but it was one more factor I used when piecing footage and lyrics together.

One fun thing about doing a music video as opposed to a straightforward record of a performance is that you can enjoy playing around with whatever special effects strike your fancy. As shown in this film still, to go with the lyrics “Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the greatest hobbit of them all?” I used the “Mirror” video effect, followed by a “Barn Door” transition where the two halves of the mirror image separated and moved apart to reveal Julian as Bilbo Baggins. A more complicated effect was to change Sam’s yellow shirt to blue for the 83 frames shown during the lyrics “bright blue my jacket is and my boots are yellow” by hand-colorizing each frame. Some of the other effects I used were to speed up and slow down the motion, to run part of the footage in reverse, to repeat one short bit upside-down immediately after having run it right-side up, and to zoom in on some still photos I had taken shortly before bringing my camcorder out.

When making a DVD of a performance, what I often do for the credits is to continue to run the camcorder following the bows and any final speeches (so you get nice authentic scenes of audience members walking around congratulating the actors, actors clowning around, and so on) and then run that footage with scrolling credits over it and the audio replaced by an appropriate song. Well, with Lords of the Trampoline I did sort of the opposite — I kept the audio of Arthur singing “We Will Rock You” while Chris talked about the Balrog, but replaced the video with scrolling credits over this reverse image of the Moria Gate.

I finished making the Lords of the Trampoline music video on May 19, 2004, a few weeks before the first annual AFE Follywood festival celebrating student (and sometimes parent or alumni) films and filmmakers, and sent a copy to the organizers. Responding to their concerns about length (films were generally supposed to be under five minutes) and language, I made a six-and-a-half-minute Follywood-cut version of the original seven-minutes-and- ten-seconds video, with the Lords of the Rhymes’ occasional bits of profanity bleeped out courtesy of yelled “BLEEP!”s by Arthur. It was a hit, and through one of those odd chains of events we often find ourselves in, even resulted in my (sadly now defunct) square-dancing group getting to dance in the Santa Cruz Pride parade that year.

For me both versions are a wonderul window back to a joyful afternoon five and a half years ago, when Arthur and Julian were definitely much shorter, and when I could see Sam basically every single day instead of just during college breaks!

Revisiting Lords of the Trampoline for YouTube

So again, Lords of the Trampoline was my third video project, back in April of 2004 when I had only had my camcorder/software setup for about two months. I had gotten a 160GB external firewire drive for $225, which at the time seemed incredible to me both in capacity and price considering that I can well remember when 10MB drives were going for about $2000. However, with prerendered files eating up about 4GB for every 20 minutes of raw video from my camcorder, as you can imagine it still wouldn’t take long to fill it up, especially with all the in-progress projects I keep racking up in addition to the completed ones. So how I dealt with the disk-space issue (besides eventually adding more and larger external drives one by one) was first, to always save my Mini-DV tapes so I could reload them onto the computer another time if necessary (obviously it saves a small amount of money to reuse tapes, but when I’ve occasionally gotten a tape with dropped frames or other problems it’s been such a headache that I don’t want to risk more of that kind of thing by reusing tapes), and second, to delete the raw video files from the external drive once some months had passed since I’d completed a project, so that it didn’t seem like I would be going back to make any additional corrections or other changes.

Then, years later, along came the rise of YouTube, and wanting to upload some of my old music videos to YouTube suddenly gave me a reason to want those raw video files back on my system again so I could rerender the music videos for YouTube as opposed to ripping them from the DVDs at a presumably lower quality. But I had some reasons to procrastinate on this: First, although I had indeed saved all my tapes, they were horribly disorganized — just set here or there all over the place. Second, I had never actually tried reloading a tape to use with an existing project after having deleted the raw video files in the first place, so I didn’t know whether after doing this everything would continue to sync up perfectly, or whether there might be some variations in video capture instances that would throw things off, especially considering that I had originally been using Vegas 4 with Windows 98SE but was now using Vegas 8 with Windows Vista (so nice to be able to render projects in a short time without crashing, instead of overnight and crashing half the time).

So, not knowing where exactly most any individual tape or set of tapes was, and being afraid that there might be some big problem with getting reloaded tapes to sync up with original project files, I kept putting it off. But then finally I was thinking about Lords of the Trampoline, and that I should write a blog entry about it (which then of course I would want to be able to link to both versions of the video on YouTube), so I took the plunge.

As it had only been my third completed project, the tape was actually easy to find, because (duh!) it was in the first place I had started sticking my used tapes. I really need to come up with some filing system for my tapes — maybe just as simple as putting them in their own file folders in my general filing cabinets, as opposed to getting or coming up with some kind of dedicated tape-storage solution. This would particularly make sense for plays, because then the tapes would just be in the same folders I’m already using for the programs, posters, etc. for those plays.

As I reloaded the tape onto one of my external drives I was pleased to see that despite five and a half years having passed since filming there were no dropped frames or other errors, but then unfortunately when I played the video within the Vegas 8 editor I saw that many of the clips were just not correct. When I looked at the properties for some of the clips I saw that all the clips I had taken from the first raw video file were correct, whereas clips from subsequent files were not, so the problem did look like Vegas 4 vs. Vegas 8 and/or Windows 98SE vs. Vista chose slightly different file sizes when breaking captured video into ~20-minute chunks. So I re-reloaded the tape onto my old Windows 98SE system (luckily still in use as my network server, among other things) using Vegas 4, copied the files to my Vista system, reloaded in Vegas 8, and almost all was fine — I noticed one more Vegas 8 vs. Vegas 4 difference, which was that the still photos I had used were now appearing with thin black bars on either side, requiring me to uncheck the “Maintain aspect ratio” box for each one. I rerendered both the original and the Follywood-cut versions as 720×480 MPEG-2 files at a constant bit rate of 9,800,000 with included audio stream, and uploaded them and they looked good — it’s great that YouTube has moved way beyond the days when for best results you had to optimize for 320×240.

And so it can be done, and so I’ll be able to rerender and upload my/our Prospero’s Island and Monkeys Don’t Wear Vests music videos at some point in the future, with presumably no problems at all other than being able to locate the tapes and the time!

(Our Follywood music videos I’m Henry IV I Am and Meg’s Beach Party are already on YouTube.)

I did this filmmaking/DVD project on commission for West End Studio Theatre, where “internationally acclaimed Eccentric and Commedia Dell’Arte performer” Julie Goell was doing a two-week residency teaching workshops in addition to performing in her one-woman show Carmen the Mopera, described as “backstage at the Opera House, a passionately imaginative restroom matron uses her arsenal of cleaning supplies to put on her own zany rendition of Bizet’s Carmen”.

I hadn’t seen the show prior to filming it last Saturday night, but after asking how long the performance would be (just over an hour) did make a point of getting advance notice of what would be a good spot to change the tape — always a major concern with hour-long mini-DV tapes and any event that lasts more than an hour without an intermission.

In terms of technical matters the filming went very smoothly, both for the dreaded tape-change and (as with the general “the more I do it the better and faster I get” rule for filmmaking and most everything else in life) having a good sense of how the action was developing and when I could and couldn’t zoom in for close-ups even though I hadn’t seen the play before.

In terms of filmmaker comfort, however, I have never felt so awful when filming before — we were at the tail end of a little heatwave, and somehow the inside of the theater was like an oven and I was sitting there with my shirt plastered to me with sweat, very acutely aware of each minute going by on my camcorder display. The heat was so bad that afterward I found myself enjoying watching the show much more when I was sitting in a cool room editing the footage than I had when I was seeing it live but feeling like a salted slug.

To repeat the “the more I do it the better and faster I get” rule a second time, as often happens these days I find myself planning/designing the DVD structure/menus/printed graphic at the same time that I’m doing the filming. One thing I expect to be mentioning a lot in this blog is my love for incorporating what it amuses me to call “found objects” into the DVDs I produce, with my particular usage of the expression “found objects” in filmmaking and DVD production referring to things like posters and programs that were an integral part of anticipating and attending the actual events but that are afterward generally lost to history. For this project I used the postcard that had been mailed out to promote the show for the DVD menu as shown below, and also printed it as a tiled image on the finished DVDs.

I felt very amused to have a legitimate reason to use the notorious Comic Sans MS for the menu-options text — matching the font color and size of its use on the postcard!

And for more of the “found objects” department, selecting “Program” on the DVD menu lets you page through the show’s program, whereas selecting “Press Release” gives you a one-minute-long scroll/stroll through the press release, with Julie Goell’s acapella version of the Carmen Overture for accompaniment.

And to close with a third repeat of the “the more I do it the better and faster I get” rule, I’m feeling very happy right now that Carmen the Mopera is not only the fourth filmmaking/DVD project I’ve completed this month, but also the second I’ve completed this week (and here it is only Wednesday, or it was when I started writing this at least!), both of which are indeed records for me, and hopefully biding very well for getting back to finishing up more of my large backlog of footage in addition to steadily-faster turnarounds on new projects.