Wishing you all a delightful Monday, friends. Thanks so much for all the listens and kind words about the new album. I had loads of fun making it, and particularly enjoyed trying to push myself on certain elements to make them more interesting and possibly in some places more confusing. Comedomusicology often demands clarity and therefore simplicity, which is great in the right places, but also sometimes feels a little limiting! Hence I put some stuff on there which might make you stop and go "wait, what?". And if you listen a little more, maybe even, "Oh, ok". Or you might just mishear my lyrics as proclaiming that I'm a cannibal - as a few of you have - which is a genuine improvement, so thanks.I wanted to give you some behind the scenes insight into my last video, which was a pretty mammoth task creatively and I thought you might be interested in how I did it. Because Hunter is currently working full time being a big boss boy of the "Industry", I knew I needed to do a video for the release by myself. Sadly that limited me a little to the realm of static cameras and green screens. And as I really wanted to do a video for this track, because it really needs it to fly, I figured why not try to save a few pennies and build the world of it myself.I drained my local craft shop of textured paper and glitter and plasticine and chunks of polystyrene, and commandeered my housemate's new motorbike helmet box to make a little set. It's actually incredibly fun building something in miniature like this. I can see why men often reach 60 and suddenly become obsessed with model trains and never leave their shed. You feel like mighty Zeus. Maybe it offers a primal compensation for all the aspects of life where you feel out of control.
The box itself can have any of the four walls taken down as I knew I'd need to shoot from a whole bunch of different angles. Particularly fun was moulding the little teeny DJ decks from plasticine, and the purple bar, which actually required zero moulding since the blocks come pre-packed in this striped texture which I realised was the perfect size if I just bent it a bit. Sometimes laziness wins. You can also see above the tissue box which turned out to be the perfect height to help the "wall art" glue set overnight.For the shoot, I got a smoke machine and a couple of lights with gels over the top, which I planned to match on my face when I did the green screen. It was a good idea in theory but ended up not really working at all as I had to flip a lot of the shots I did anyway. When I filmed the little set I made a shot list of every individual shot, plus did lots of extras for the inevitable stuff I missed. It involved a lot of cranking the smoke machine and setting off the fire alarm and making lifelong enemies out of those sleeping.You can see in the pics above the little toy train with a plasticine nubbin coming out of it, which I used as a stand in for tiny Me, so I could get the focus right on any shots with movement. Again, I didn't do the best job here and lot of stuff had to be fixed in post with blurring etc. The following night I did the green screen stuff, and tried as best I could to match the angles and shots and lighting to what I'd filmed in miniature. See my notes above. My favourite is "getting more vigorous". As if that wasn't inevitable from anything I filmed... Let me tell you that trying to check the shot looks good on my tiny little flip camera screen 3m away is not the easiest task. Also above, you can see a photo of me at 4am despairing because I realised half of the green screen shots are not well lit enough to key out the green and I would have to do them again...The shot of me looking up in the club at the end of the video is a technique I stole from my stateside bud Max (who some of you might know as Value Select). I lay on a table on my back upside down and stared at the camera. If you look closely you can actually see the veins in my forehead gradually increasing in size as they struggle to cope with the violent influx of blood. At this point I started to feel a bit queasy so I decided to leave the rest until the next night.Then came the edit, which as you can see above was a lot of pasting over the cracks of moments that I'd messed up, and doing as much as I could to distract from the shaky moments... It ended up looking quite different to how I'd pictured it in my head. But I think therein lies the Joy of Creation. Overall the whole project, from conception of song in January, to end of video edit, must have taken me between 200-300 hours. By far the most time I've spent on a video. I think next time I'll try something a little more straight forward. But it was a great experiment to see how far I could push the limits of the solo vid!The next year brings live gigs, which will mean that the visual content rate will go down as I work out how to bring these songs to life onstage. I've bought loads of equipment (read: musical toys) which I've been playing around with. I'll put some stuff out with them soon.As ever, I love you all so dearly for your generous support as I figure this stuff out. I can't wait to meet you all whenever I can bring a show to your area. Watch this space on that for next year, too...All my loveJE xxx