A full busy day. Started with website updates and have now filed my writings in order from recent to old; it seemed silly to have the same old ones at the top.
Then started the process of working on the Jabberwocky video. We have shot about 50 clips. The first job is to review them for useful parts, name them, discard any that aren't suitable, and convert them to avi for 'hand' editing using AviSynth. Then it was a matter of going through the tune section by section, adding clips to match the mood and reviewing these often to make them all fit neatly. Speech and voices need to be synchronised at times too.
This process took until about 8pm; 6 minutes is so long for a music video! Doubling the length of a video seems to quadruple the time to work on it because of all of the countless watching and re-watching, but now a first, very rough, draft is done. This is only a mix of the clips so far. The colours are inconsistent, there are no nice scene changes and I probably need to shoot more footage. It would be nice to include the Jabberwocky model in there at some point. This is a much more complex piece of music than most of my other music videos, there are lots of areas for contrast and emotional crescendi.
Here is Deb, as the Jabberwock approaches...
The result is very rough at the moment, almost like lots of paper pages sellotaped together in a chain, but there are one or two moments that grab the attention. Next I need to watch it a lot and build on those moments, and try to work out what new footage is needed.
I expect this will take all week. I hope that by the 13th I can have a first draft complete enough for a 'taster' video.
In the evening I played electric guitar to Histoire De Melody Nelson, which was great fun. The amp has revolutionised my guitar, as did my Chicken Pick. My playing today sounded at least as good as on the record, well, of course, I added a lot more. It was good to use a lot of staccato in there, stabs of chords and notes. Jazzy music like this is such a joy to play.
My mood is good. A long and full day of work is perfect.
