howie’s halfpipe

I just installed final cut Express HD and soundtrack onto lappy along with 4,000 roylatry free music loops.

how fun.

now i need a video to make.

a couple of weeks ago i was home sick (just for something different) and tom had a day off. So in between my trips to the bathroom we made this abismal video. titled “big sister”

its about 7 mins long and you can watch it by clicking on the logo or download it by right clicking and “save target as”

oh bevis i hope its ok we used your music.

Today i saw a television on a fridge.

It was in franklins in a coke drinks fridge near the counter. I thought that strange why is there a little tv in the fridge. I went up to it and it was a touch screen and it said ‘touch here” so i did. It just seemed to play advertisments for mount franklin water. So not all that exciting in the end but still kind of fun.

Well here it is the Kodak Z740

5.0 Mega Pixel
10x optical zoom
Digital SLR
Internal memory and SD Cards.
I already had a 64MB SD card, which i know is a pansy card. Well today i got a 512MB SD card with some support money i got. So thats good that will be big enough to take lots of photos in greece.
Also Jenny’s parents bought me a camera bag for it too.

this is a photo of REC. The concert in Nowra run by James.
Tom and i both went down. I was on Camera 1, moving around on the stage and Tom was mixing.
It was a lot of fun, the silhouette on the right hand side of the stage is me doing my thing on the camera.

I love stages and lights and cameras and screens.

both videos done.
THe one i did today was much better than the the one i did yesterday and saturday. But still didnt enjoy making it. But i think people liked it.

Video editing sucks. It’s painful, its tedious, its time consuming, its boring.

I finnished one of the videos today that i had to make for work. It was dodge but i dont really care. or i really dont care. either way works.

Anyway one more video to make and it needs to be done by this afternoon.

I should never have come back into the land of video making.

Or if i do do videos i just want to do camera and then thast it, after that its someone elses problem to edit it.

Today for work I had to go into the city and film the Easter march from town Hall to Hyde Park, and then a bit of the festival afterwards.

I got there early and did some establishing shots, got a few landmarks in so you can tell its in Sydney.
Then just before the march began I got some shots of the crowd gathering and some long shots of the crowd from a distance.
Then the media rocked up!
Now normally this would excite me cause it would mean you can hang out with them and get similar shots to them and just latch on to the group of TV channels. In the past this has been a great experience for me, like at the No War march’s and even last years Easter march. But this year it didn’t excite me, and its not because of my recent divorce from the world of making videos. Its all about Pride, Self Esteem and Aesthetics.
You see in my head I think of myself as a bit of a professional standard cameraman, Now I’m probably not but in my head I am.
And us professionals only like to work with the best of equipment, because we are striving for the best quality picture we can possibly muster. In past marchs I have at least had a pro-sumer camera (prosumer is a cross between a professional and just your average consumer). Like my Panasonic 3CCD camera. It’s a decent camera and sure its no TV station camera but its at bare minimum community television , and with my camera the media guys would not look down on you too much because obviously you know what you are doing a bit. Last years easter march I had Steve Bevis’s camera which again is a nice 3CCD camera the canon XM1. So I fitted in with the media.
But now we get to this year, where I had one of works cameras which was no bigger than my clenched fist. Its lens is about the same size as a 20 cent coin and the tripod may as well have been made out of paddle pop sticks.

It was embarrising standing in the middle of park street filming the march approaching and knowing that either side of me where media guys with massive DVCAM over the shoulder cameras on their chunky miller tripods. I felt like a piece of road kill with eagles swarming around me. Me and my little hanycam just didn’t cut it. Sure my shots might have been all right but the media guys wont have seen that, all they will have picked up on is that there is some punk with a handycam making a home movie on their turf.

It was like I was at a set of traffic lights in my little blue barina and then up beside me pulls a big HSV Commodore with its V8 engine rumbling. It was like that, I could hear the TV dudes revving the engines of their big cameras and there I was siting in the lane beside them in my little beep beep barina.

In fact at one stage I was taking this good shot from the middle of the march with the crowds filing past me, recoding away, and then BOOM. This big miller tripod lands in front of my lens and a giant DVCAM camera locks onto the top of it. There he was a media man stealing my shot as if I didn’t exist.

Never again shall I take a handycam to anything where I will be seen and will harm my self image.

I was thinking about the film clip for Escalotor girl today as i walked around westfield with jenny.

I think you should make some music for it scott, then late at night we can sneak into westfield and film a video clip.

I think i’m emotionally realy to start making silly videos again now, still not up to serious ones yyet but i’ll get there.

Is it geeky that i would like to subscribe to “australian video camera” magazine?

I have lost the passion, the drive and the intrest in video production.

THere was once a day where i would jump at any opertunity to get behind a camera.
But these days its much more of a chore, only if i have to. Its just not fun and i blame the wedding videos.
They really were the bane of my existance over the last 12 months and they have driven me into a state which i like to call anit-videoproductionalism

I think i need to take a long break from making any videos whatsoever and slowly come back onto making videos but only videos that i want to do and that will bring the enjoyment back for me.
Not having the drive and excitement that i once had means that when i do make videos these days they are not a quality that is all that good anyway cause i’m just so over it.

tom just told me about a quote out of captain correllis mandolin where a man comes home from the war after fighting for the memory of his fiance and discovers taht she is not the woman that he remembers he decideds to go back to the war to fall in love with her all over again

So i guess this is a bit of a warning, dont ask me to make videos for you in the near future casue i’ll either say no or i’ll do a shonky job.

its a shame i used to love making videos soo so much.

its also not the end of the world there is plenty of other skills and stuff that i can do.

I finnished the wedding video and i have now fired myself from the wedding video business. I will never return, oh boy i’m a happy boy now.

Just say hyperthetically you were editing a wedding video and you where going through the tapes about to capture some more footage onto the computer. But then you find something. You find that the entire reception has been recorded badly by the camera probabyl due to unclean recording heads. You realise that this camera was the main camera used in the reception and that its unusable the entire length of the 1 hour tape.

so just hyperthetically this happened, how would you respond?

So here I am at 2:30 in the morning blogging whilst editing a wedding video.

I have just finnished a rough cut of the ceremony which is 56 minutes in length. I was planning on powering through the night until its all finnished.
But i have come across some mechanical failures. The problem is that they have nothing to do with the computer. Its me thats breaking down.
Editing requires quite a lot of concentration and patience and stuff and i think my body isnt up for that right now. My left eye is going crazy, its twitching like no bodies business, and i have this cramp thing in my stomach or ribs or somewhere that hurts. So i’m taking the bold step of going to bed now for a few hours to see if my body feels any better after a few hours sleep.

The final wedding video i am reckoning will be about 2 hours long.

So so long. I tell you what when iget married i want the service to be about 15 minutes long and the reception well who needs a video of the reception.

So time for some shut eye.

Not quite sure if it’s a relief or if now its just going to rest harder on my conscious.

Today one of the peoples whom wedding video I haven’t finished yet cam to visit me at work. He wasn’t very happy, as I can understand. Anyway he has asked me to give hi the tapes by next week (un-edited) and that I have to repay him $200. He is going to go and get it edited somewhere else. I didn’t bother saying much cause I could tell if I opened my mouth he would have just got angrier so ijust quietly agreed and now here I am in this strange position.
Its not good that it came to this, really not good.

I tell you wedding videos are of the devil.

Anyway I’m not sure if the weight has been lifted off my shoulders in some way. Now I don’t have to edit the video but I do have to pay 200 bucks and I have made a man quite frustrated.

I don’t know.

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggg
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I tell you the video guy at my wedding is gonna get to sit at the front table with me and the wife. He has made a bigger commitment to making the video than it is to get married.

Wedding videos grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Today one of steve and bel’s friends was coming round so I could help her edit a video for her church,
She turned up and we talked about what she wanted to do with the video, then I set up toms computer to begin the editing process, and there was capturing problems, eventually I got the capturing to work, then started to make a title, the title program was being a dog, and having a “sharing error”
Then premiere decided it would perform a few illegal operations and need to shut down the computer, after a few times of this I thought to myself, ok lets record the music and leave premiere for a tick, so I opened cool edit and record one of the songs, but then cool edit had a fit and wouldn’t save anything. So I went back to premiere and the project had disappeared and then it performed another illegal operation and shut down the computer.
Kylie had to rush off to a meeting so we never got much of her video edited