Still, it's 8:20am on Saturday morning, really pleased with how well we go on yesterday at The Fat Fowl shooting Liam.
Let me just explain what's happening so we're on the same page. Basically, I'm producing a new music video documentary about Liam Blake - what music/artwork has influenced his latest album and where he's drawn his inspiration from.
The last week has been filled with pre-production. The amount of phone calls and emails I've been doing has been ridiculous but I wanted this to be as real-life as possible. It's been draining, exciting and relentless. I've been on edge and I've felt tense all week! Such as the life of a producer, this is hardcore.
This is technically a professional project we're doing for Helium Records, Liam's label, but next time it could and hopefully will be, a corporate job. However, what this does give us is an opportunity to work with some fantastic people with mutual interests on a great project in the exotic south.
Seb and I have travelled down to Bath and we spent yesterday shooting our first film sequence for the video. We filmed a quaint little gig he did at a restaurant called The Fat Fowl in Bradford On Avon.
It's a lovely tapas and jazz bar.. never even knew those kinds of places existed but the owners were lovely and Liam's gig was excellent as well. To start with we encountered a whole world of issues with the lighting. From what I've learnt so far there's two fundamental things that you just cannot change in post-production: lighting and focus. Seb's cutaways were lovely shots, but ridiculously dark and playing them back on the laptop showed us just how unsuitable they were.
So, a quick jog up the steepest hill in the world. Seriously, if I go outside in a bit and my car is not in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the hill I'll be doing well! Picked up some more lights and jogged back down.
With those lights set up it did make a big different but there was still some more improvements to be made.
Cue, another jog to the car.
When we'd finally got all the sound rigged up and the lights in place, we had achieved a warm and dramatic look. Really pleased with how we used the stupid amount of kit we've got to sort it all out - the end result on the video is nice and high-quality. Bullseye.
Today we're aiming to be in Bath by 10am so very shortly we'll pack the car........ahh how lovely, Liam's just come in offering a cooked breakfast...isn't that incredible.
We're staying with the most hospitable people in the world. I told Seb to pack some food and other crap just incase we felt like we were encroaching on Liam and his wife, but it's turned out to be far from that, they're the loveliest people and the house has such character. Even though we did fill it with far too many bags.
Last night when we got back in, I had two of the thickest slices of toast with, well, it tasted like actual raspberries on it, not jam. Seb had scrambled eggs on (the same) toast (the same thick granary bread, not the same slice, jam and eggs, weird man.. c'mon).
Seb also got a really cool mug for some late night coffee.............ahh maybe that's why I couldn't sleep. My brain was buzzing, mentally storyboarding what we've got so far.. As yesterday wasn't, today could be deadly.
Currently I think Seb is getting some nice shots of the early morning ambience upstairs and outside. I need to make a move because Liam's gone out the shop and I need to look after the coffee.
Like I say, this blog's been in development for some time now and I've had to change the tenses of most verbs here just so it now reads current.
For some reason I've embedded this Bon Iver video so there seems no logical reason to remove it. This is from some guy who felt it would be wise to video record the whole gig. Fortunately we saw it in it's entirety at Birminham O2 last Wednesday.... there are some life experiences you treasure and every moment of that gig was special to the n'th degree, with this song illustrating how magnificent his voice is.
