Dangerous Driving

IndyMogul had filled me with confidence regarding green screening. As well as this eagerness to chroma key something/anything, Jody had an idea to record a song with her singing, but make a music video where I mime to her singing and she mimes to my guitar playing or whatever.

The song was a cover of Green Day's Hitchin' a Ride that we recorded in an afternoon as soon as the idea arose. We initially intended to change the feel of the song from swung triplets to straight eighths but kind of forgot about it as we got stuck in which is why the song ends up drifting between the two feels, I like this though.

The drum samples were as always my custom made samples taken from my friend Ash's crappy old kit with an AKG D112on the kick, a Shure Sm57on the snare and a pair of Rode NT5'sas XY overheads. When we sampled his kit (this time December 2007, the first in April 2003 with a single Shure SM58to a tape machine, these hissy samples were all over Follow up Treatment and Themes 1-50) I had wanted the big open stereo sound of spaced overheads. I was therefore a little disappointed at first with the stereo width of the XY overheads but have grown to love them. The whole reason we sampled his crappy old kit with limited recording means was to get a lofi garage sounding drum sample set and the almost mono representation helps keep to this idea.

After recording the song we set straight to filming the video, starting with our hand drawn car we had decided to sit in. That was all simple enough, next came the trickiest bit: finding some kind of large backdrop that was of a colour not to be found in our skin tones (i.e. a blue or green screen). After hunting high and low we managed to find a really heavy kind of blue air-bed.



As you can see, this set up was less than crap. Apart from the air-bed being a few shades of very dark blue, it's weight proved tricky and the best we could do to get it behind us was to sling it over a precarious broom handle/chair arrangement giving almost enough coverage for us to perform in front of. Unfortunately I didn't realise until much later that zooming in from further away would have changed the perspective so that the background would have appeared larger in comparison to us in the foreground.

Anyway, I was up first and was surprised at how hard lip syncing is, I sing along to songs all the time! After my many failed attempts Jody did a great job, not only did she have to mime her guitar parts, but backing vocals at the end too.

I'd love to say we made the whole thing in a day (working quickly and slap-dash is my preference) but by the time we had finished filming our miming bits it was very late. So the next lunchtime we went for a short spin and recorded five minutes of footage from the sunroof of the car. Once this was dropped into the video project, sent to the back and sped up to a minute and a half, we were done!