Okay, so, so far this is the best music video I've made. It was the second one I completed. Notice I say "I completed" because there are about four more segments of videos hiding out on my computer, still. Anyway this one was done in just about two weeks with Tony, the singer of the band helping out. He and I would each draw ghosts and I'd pull a record out of my collection and he'd give it the yay or nay. I did a few without him around so I snuck in some albums maybe he doesn't care for, but I think we're all pretty proud of this video.
We did most of them with paper cut outs but I did a few in photoshop-- off the top of my head, I know I did Kiss, Slint, the Black Crowes, My Morning Jacket and Guns 'n' Roses that way. All the animation is done a frame at a time either in photoshop or using my still camera and then i used iMovie to make it move. Tony did the whole NOFX one almost completely on his his own.
Hotel St. George- That's Why I Drink Every Night
This one gave me nightmares. I had the basic idea, and what I wanted to do was have singers of San Diego bands each sing a line from the song. Most of them hadn't yet heard of Hotel St. George as of when this video was made so the band and Rick from M-Theory and I all reached out to get just, whoever we could to show up and be in a video and pretend to sing. We did get a few local band people, you can see Andrew from Lights On, Tony from Fever Sleeves, Andy from Writer, John from The Howls, Aaron from Chaz and Tim from Arms Entwined are all in there. Brian from Hotel St George brought his amazing cameras so when it looks REALLY good that's completely him. He also edited this video, which is another task I literally could NOT have done.
I was pretty disappointed with this video at first, but I watched it again a few months down the road and I actually liked it way better. I realize what I didn't like was the memory of how stressful it was to organize 40 people that were all drinking beer and a few were, in my mind trying to ruin the video. Oh well! My friend summarized it best when he said to me, it's like when you were watching MTV in the middle of the night in the 90's and people just were so excited that they got to make a video. That made me feel a lot better, that it could have been on 120 minutes once and been someone's favorite video that nobody ever knew existed.
Hotel St. George- Simple Man
So, this one, I made almost on accident. I really like it, though. They were recording their third album (they did 5 in two years.... beat that!) and I went to the recording studio and just was taking pictures. I got the idea to take a WHOLE LOT of pictures and go right home and dump them into iMovie and have a video ready before the album. They got me a mix of the song before they were even done recording the whole thing, and I posted it. Someone criticized it saying, well, the images don't sync up with the video. Well, things don't always go that way. This video is what it is, I'm proud of it and I'm happy I made it.
Da Bears- Sword in Hand
This was the one that started it all, but actually it was the second video I ever made. Every image in this was taken with my still camera. The first of the cut-paper scenes was the first scene I did and then I thought, I can do this. Since I had just finished doing the album cover for Da Bears album "Classics Never Die/ Cowardly Cobra", I approached them about doing this video. They were pretty into it. I can't say there's a ton of technical proficiency on display but it's an enjoyable video. If I saw it on TV, I'd definitely watch the whole thing.
