One Take Sessions: Kieran Byrne (Video)
The 2010 series of KilkennyMusic.com’s One Take Sessions kicked off last Friday night in Cleere’s Theatre with four more acts taking to the stage; first up on the night and fighting for the record of most OTS appearances is Kieran Byrne.
This new video, ‘Seven Day Mile‘, is the first of four videos from the night (one of each of the acts), we’ll be uploading a new video every week in the run up to the April Sessions and hopefully by the time the Sessions close at the end of this year we’ll have built up a great collection of videos over on KilkennyMusicTV.
Shot on a Canon HG10 and Sony Hybrid HandyCam; with the Canon set up on a tripod at the back of the room and me with the Sony at the front right of the stage (standing on a chair) with Ken recording the tracks through the desk and mixing in Pro Tools.
Cut together using Final Cut Express 4 (the other three are currently rough cut), Ken designed the titles and overlays and I added them in After Effects. In post I also added some zooms to the shots from the Canon.
I’m really looking forward to the constant flow of video footage for editing practice, I’m currently working on an animated intro sequence for the videos and we’ve got a few more content ideas that we’ll be adding as we go along.
Don’t forget to subscribe to KilkennyMusicTV for upcoming videos and keep an eye on KilkennyMusic for news on the next One Take Sessions.
Irish Blog Awards 2010 – Net News Nightly (Video)
The 5th annual Irish Blog Awards took place in Galway on Saturday and here’s the Net News Nightly video sketch myself and Ken McGuire threw together to be shown on the night.
Ken had asked me weeks ago if I was interested in throwing something together for it but with the run of ‘Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!’ we had forgotten about it. With the play finished and the awards looming we met up on Tuesday afternoon to brainstorm ideas. Most of the afternoon was spent drinking tea and coming up with dead-end scenarios, all we knew for certain was that we wanted it to focus on the highly debated topic of late “Blogging is Dead!”.
The videos had to be sent on Friday so given our time constraints we needed to keep it simple, opting to go for a single set-up news bulletin with everything shot on green screen (giving me more practice in After Effects). We met up again on Wednesday for the shoot in my sitting room. The main problem was a lack of lights, Ken brought a double-headed construction work light but only one of the lights worked; I used this to light the green screen and used my small desk lamp to light Ken. It wasn’t ideal but we were working against the clock. We shot the whole thing in about 20 minutes with Ken as the Net News Nightly reporter and me as the terrorist leader responsible for the death of blogging.
The opening sequence was put together using a royalty free graphics sequence and music from the iLife collection then I added the animated titles designed by Ken. The background behind Ken is another royalty free graphic sequence, the green screen removal is a bit rough but that’s simply because of the lack of lights. The riot footage was pulled offline and Ken designed Sky News style overlays which I added to the entire sketch.
With the rough cut assembled, all the backgrounds replaced and the overlays in place, we added the finishing touches with the scrolling bar at the bottom displaying retweets from Twitter about the death of blogging and finally a completely random image of a cat and a laptop to finish Net News Nightly; your daily internet news… nightly!
I’m told there was a great response to the video at the awards on Saturday night, having missed the session this year I’m already making a plan to go to next years awards and hopefully we’ll put together another video for that too.
You can check out all the videos from the night here and you can see the list of Irish Blog Awards 2010 winners here, well done to all the winners.
KilkennyMusic Animated Logo 1
The first One Take Sessions of 2010 kicks off tonight in Cleere’s and over the past few weeks myself and the Chief have been planning out video content for this years Sessions.
While that content will hopefully start appearing online over the next few weeks I’ve just uploaded a first attempt at an animated logo for KilkennyMusic.com. I’ve spent the past week or so playing around with animated title sequences, getting to grips with 3D elements and creating camera movements in After Effects.
It’s a lot of fun but my main problem was that I didn’t really have any real content to work on, so with the Sessions approaching I asked Ken to send me on some KKM logos to play around with. The above animated logo was the preferred one in the end.
I kept it very basic to start with; bringing the K logo and the splatter in from opposite sides then moving the 3D camera so they move upwards as KilkennyMusic.com appears underneath. To finish it off I added a royalty free sound effect from the iLife collection.
I’m quite happy with it giving that it took about 10 minutes to create, they’ll get more complicated as I progress with After Effects and we start pushing out video content from the Sessions. As always feedback is welcome.
The first One Take Sessions of 2010 kicks off tonight in Cleere’s Theatre with performances from Kieran Byrne, Eoin MacNamara, Little Black Wren and Mugger Dave.
Doors open 9:30pm and it’s FREE! Check out KilkennyMusic.com for more details.
Tokyo/Glow
March 4, 2010 by oss237
Filed under Posts Before July 2011, Video
Check out this awesome short film, Tokyo/Glow written and directed by Jonathan Bensimon.
It follows the journey of an illuminated man from a crosswalk sign as he embarks on an adventure. Shot on location throughout Tokyo using thousands of individual digital stills, the light suit was constructed using hundreds of feet of high-voltage LED rope and a translucent nylon outer shell to achieve the striking effect of the illuminated man.
Post-production included weeks of extensive roto-scoping and compositing, a colour grade, and once the effects were complete the thousands of still images were pieced together. Quite simply it’s amazing!
Canada’s Shame
Born Of Hope
If you’re a fan of Lord Of The Rings or a low budget film maker then you have to check out ‘Born Of Hope’.
It’s a low-budget fan-made feature-length, based on appendices from LOTR, shot over a period of six years with a cast of 400, and it was produced for only £25,000.
The film runs at 1 hour and 11 minutes and due to copyright laws it’s only available to watch online.
Given how it was made, it’s damn impressive. Make sure and check out BornOfHope.com for all sorts of production diaries, concept art and more.
Have you voted yet!?
Voting is still open in the final round of Busker2009, the Kilkenny 400 Busking Competition in association with KilkennyMusic.com.
If you haven’t cast your vote for your favourite busker yet then click here to go to Busker2009.com and check out video performances by the six finalists; Sean Watmore, Quintet Tarantino, Fionn O’Hargain, Vicky Day (above), Annie Chambers and Beef Supreme. One of these finalists will walk away with a €1,000 cash prize!
Voting closes this coming Friday at 11:59pm. And don’t forget that you must click the link in the confirmation email to make sure your vote counts. If you don’t click the link in the email to confirm your vote, your vote won’t count!
Tune into KCLR96FM tomorrow around 3:15pm to hear more about the competition.
Mata Hari – Fast Way (Music Video)
Back in March I posted a behind the scenes video from my photo-shoot with Mata Hari; as the lads recorded their first music video.
The video for “Fast Way” has just gone online; awesomely shot and cut by student filmmaker Ivars Burtnieks.
As I mentioned before, the video was shot in a freight container in the Hebron industrial estate but it also features footage of the classic rockers in the studio recording. Much to my surprise I even make a little cameo in the video, if you look really closely at around 3 minutes and 30 seconds you’ll spot me setting up for my promo shoot with the band.
If you missed it before then you can check out my behind the scenes video and promo shots from the shoot with Mata Hari here.
Well done to Ivars for doing a great job with the video for “Fast Way”, you can check out more of his videos here on Youtube and you’ll find Mata Hari here on MySpace.
Vote for “Once I Counted Birds”
“Once I Counted Birds” a new short film by ArtLinks Director Cathy Fitzgerald is currently entered in the UK Guardian’s Climate Change film competition 1MinuteToSaveTheWorld.
This new film incorporates old footage taken by Cathy on a biodiversity research trip to Suwarrow; a remote, un-peopled atoll in the Cook Islands, South Pacific, in 2000. Suwarrow is an important breeding place for seabirds of all types including the rare and very large Masked Booby; her and fellow scientist Rhys Jones collected data was later published in the NZ Forest and Bird Journal 2001 and the project was a jointly sponsored UN and Cook Island project. While the trip may look idyllic, Cathy almost drowned when the yacht she and her colleague hitched a lift with was hit by a freak wave. Her new digital camcorder was destroyed but her old Hi8 survived to take this footage.
Many years later, Cathy is now actively involved in promoting ecological, permanent forestry in her small woodlands in Ireland; she blogs and creates works about converting her 20 year old spruce plantation to a permanent forest using Pro Silva, close to nature, forestry methods. She believes that small local ecologically based actions can have a positive effect globally and personally.
You can vote for “Once I Counted Birds” here; simply give the video a rating. From what I can tell, it is the only Irish entry in the competition and I think it would be great to see Cathy win given her huge interest in ecology/environmental politics & film and years of hard work promoting the Arts in Ireland.
The voting closes this Friday and don’t forget to follow Cathy’s EcoArtNotes on Twitter for updates and new work.
Busker 2009: Final Voting Is Open!
Voting is now open on the final six acts in the Kilkenny 400 Busking Competition; Busker 2009.
After seven months and countless hours of street music, the final round of busking for the competition took place on the streets of Kilkenny on Saturday with finalists Quintet Tarantino, Sean Watmore, Vicky Day, Beef Supreme (above), Annie Chambers and Fionn O’Hargain all competing for the €1,000 cash prize.
As always voting is open to the public so please go to Busker2009.com to watch the six video performances by our finalists and cast your vote for the best busker of 2009.
You will get an email asking you to confirm your vote and please note that only confirmed votes will be accepted.
Voting closes at 23:59 GMT on Friday November 13th.
