Video: A Night In The Big Room

Now that the new studio PC is up and running I'm devoting some time to work that was interrupted by the change-over. This includes completing a new e.p. of various experiments that don't fit with the theme of the new Manitou album, and videos for some of the pieces from Atmospheres Part I.

A Night In The Big Room was inspired by the building you see in the video footage. I shot this sometime around 2007 on a VHS-C camcorder. For the story behind the sound collage, see this post.

Promo Video: March Of The Rads & Radioatomic Playlist

Delayed somewhat due to a reformat of the studio computer, here is the promo video for March Of The Rads: the opening atmosphere from the Radioatomic album.


Technical commentary about the audio can be found in this post. The video features footage from one of my favourite locations: the abandoned diatomite quarry. It has featured in many of the posts on this blog, many of my videos, and in my cover photography. The footage used here was collected over a period of three years, with the wobbling bar and yours truly walking in the foundations being among the most recent.

This being the final promo video for the Radioatomic material, I've grouped them all into a playlist that follows the album's running order. The only tracks not included are the two versions of '96MHz,' which I didn't feel needed illustrating. When you have a spare hour and eight minutes, why not give it a spin?

Promo Video: A Robot In Every Home

I'm currently completing the extant promo videos for the Radioatomic album. Here's A Robot In Every Home. This time I tried my hand at mixing stock footage with footage from the studio. Up until now the two styles have been kept separate. I sourced scenes from three public domain films: Leave It To Roll-Oh, The Middleton Family At The New York World's Fair, and The Last Word In Dishwashing. Studio footage includes my trusty tin robot Mini Radiocon, the Parker Brothers' Merlin game, the Roland HS-60, and Novation K-Station.

To give you an idea how much effort goes into these promo videos, I devoted one to two hours to the editing each evening over the course of a week. The studio footage was accomplished in a couple of afternoon sessions, and sourcing and converting digital film stock about the same again. Rendering the finished film took roughly six hours. It would go quicker, but my system isn't optimal for the task.

So, without further ado, let's see what kind of future we might've had if atomic power was all it was cracked up to be ...

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Promo Videos: The Mechanicals (Part 2)

I took a short break from my single releases to illustrate a couple of tracks from 2012's 'The Mechanicals' e.p. I've had some of the video footage 'in the can' since I completed the release but never got around to editing it. I'm glad I waited, because I ended up shooting some extra footage that greatly improved the visuals.

First up, here's The Mechanicals (Part 2). I decided to go with monochrome for this one, to reflect the mood of the piece.

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Secondly, The Mechanicals (Part 2) [End Of The World Remix], which was a collaboration with my friend Jimmy 'Jamz' Aaron. Since the track has a lot more energy to it and uses a lot of the same footage, I chose to keep it in colour.

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For those of you that are interested in such things, the mechanical devices seen in these videos are a hand-cranked rolling mill, a vintage Remington 12 typewriter (which can be seen in this post), and a vintage electric sewing machine (the make and model of which escapes me at the moment). They were filmed with a Nikon D7000 (as are all my videos of late) with an 18-55mm kit lens and a 40mm macro.

Thanks to: Jimmy for the collaboration, my dad for the use of the rolling mill, and my uncle for the use of the typewriter.

You can, of course, still purchase The Mechanicals e.p. via my bandcamp page, and read all about it in this post.