I was one of the 20 people asked by the 20×2 organizers to answer the question “What’s the difference” in 2 minutes. They said I could do a film, speak, play music, what ever I felt like and since I had recently had fun making music, I decided to write this song. It was a cool event and but it happened at the same time as the From Here to Awesome party so I could only stay to see one other performance which I really liked. Special thanks to Mike Hedge for filming.

Formats available: MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

Tech Notes:
Mike Hedge filmed on his VX-2100 on mini-DV tapes. He rolled on about 10 tapes or so at SXSW 2008 and then gave me the tapes at the end of the event. I took them home and brought each tape in it’s entirety into Final Cut Pro onto a new blank hard Lacie Hard Drive. I did this by hitting “Apple 8″ to open the log and capture window. Then I rewound the tape to the beginning, pressed play and hit the “now” button. This is the easiest way to bring in tapes. Some say it’s better to sit around and label each 1 minute of footage but that would be 60 cilps if I did that and thats way too much work. But one key capturing footage this way is that you have to set a couple preferences first. In final cut pro hit “option Q” to pull up the system preferences window. Then make sure the “abort ETT/PTV on dropped frames” is unchecked. Then also uncheck “Abort capture on dropped frames” and in the “on time code break” drop down menu choose “make new clip.” With these settings you’ll be able to hit “now” and walk away from your camera and computer if you want while all your footage gets brought in to Final Cut Pro. If all this sounds like a pain, iMovie is another good way to bring footage in. Then you can take your iMovie files to Final Cut Pro and edit them there.


After the footage was all brought in I did nothing for 3 months. Then suddenly I found this material and edited it together and quickly posted it. But after posting the performance I watched more of the pre-performance anxiety and realized that if I don’t add that material in then there isn’t enough context around the performance. So I edited a second version. As described in previous Tech Notes, I use TubeMogul to post videos to over a dozen video sharing sites. On draw back to this is when I change an edit as I just did. So to deal with that I just double post and leave the early one up too. No sense in logging into myspace, youtube, blip and all the others and deleting the last version. Some day I hope that I’ll be hosting my master file of a video and if I enhance my edit then all the other sites will be “ping” each other and will then re-cache their copy of my video. Until then, this system seems to work.

Also there is some basic color correction going on and during the black and white parts I just dragged the saturation all the way down. With color correction my general rule is always to lower the blacks, raise the mids and adjust the whites so nothing is too bright.

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Forest Fire performes their song Fortune Teller at The Appartment in Brooklyn NY January 5th 2008. Due to seeing my videos of Sharon I was invited by Michael Leviton to his and Leah Hayes apartment where they have monthly open mic.People show up and get on a list and then perform a couple songs and there is tons of video and photography happening of it all. To get all of the performances coming out of the Appartment go to their YouTube page.And to get all of my videos go to my subscribe page.Tech Notes:This footage was shot in 720 24pn on the HVX-200 and color corrected in final cut studio with color correction filter lowering saturation and boosting mids and whites. I encoded the footage into the Apple TV codec using compressor and then changed the file name from a .m3v to a .mov and uploaded to Tubemogul.com where it was cross posted to my blip channel where I logged in and edited this HTML and then arincrumley.com and a few other sites got the cross post. Check my tutorial on this uploading and cross posting process.

Sharon Van Etten performs “Damn Right” to at the noisy bar in Brooklyn. The back room there is a little bit better but right at the bar in the front room it’s hard to grab peoples attention on this particular night. Only some of the room is engaged and that tension really works for a song about unrequited love.

Sign up on Sharon’s Mailing List to get information about future shows. Also check out my twitter because I usually post when I’m planning to go to a show.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv)

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Sharon Van Etten invited me to her show sunday night at Zebulon and I decided to film it. I had captured an event that she was a part of two nights earlier but this was cool because it was a full length set. Also had back up vocals on a few songs from Ben Sanabria and myisha from Forest Fire who had performed earlier.

The thing that amazed me about the show was the transition from noisy bar to mesmorized audience. Now and then you hear the squeek of the bathroom door but other then that the entire bar was sitting in captivated slience.

Earlier in the night I also filmed a couple songs performed by Leah Hayes who goes by Scary Mansion and who is also in the band La Laque. Unfortunatley the footage is very dark so I’m probably not going to post those songs. I had asked the sound man to brighten the stage for Sharon which helped a lot.

I’d love to hear peoples thoughts about Sharon’s music. Also I always love suggestions of other indie underground material to listen to or possibly go see live. Please post a comment below.

This is the third live show video I’ve posted and plan to do more in the future as well as continue blogging about indie film, the creative process and the digital art landscape. Grab my RSS feed or get an email everytime I post new stuff online.

*UPDATE: This video is temporarily set to private because the artist I’ll refer to as Matt is concerned the footage doesn’t reflect well on his music and wanted to not have this material I posted show up on the top 10 google results. In the interested of keeping this footage up so people can watch the other performers I will later make this video unprivate once google has caught up to the fact that non of the videos currently have the artists full name in the post or in the tags. So basically we are working to get this video off of google search results and once that is complete the video will be viewable again.

So please don’t try to watch the below video, for the time being it is supposed to not work.

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My friend Coco has a space she is refering to as the Wash Closet. I went to their first show their on friday and decided to film some sections of the evenings line up.

This video starts out with some improve modern dance by Rachel McKinstry and then at 3:50 my friend Sharon Van Etten comes in with her song “I don’t know”. Then she performs “keep” and then “I’m not me” and around 15:30 Coco Karol, who put on this whole show, gets carried out and set in the bath tub from which she slow emerges becoming part of Sharon’s Performance. Sharon closes on a song that is available as a free download through Sharon’s myspace and that has previously been posted on YouTube after having been filmed at the apartment.

Around 21:00 the set changes to a live performance art piece mixed with live noise music and projections. After taking a break from filming I started again for the next act who wishes to not be linked to. His set starts out very slow and abstract but kicks into songs around 30 minutes.  And around 31:00 for me it starts to jell in kind of a stripped down early Flaming Lips feel. That especially occurs in their catchy ballad that occurs at 34:30 called “Commonplace feathers”.

Then at 36:30 a pretty meta sample begins to play which was Matt’s voice playing back off an audio recorder saying, “So coco, I just want to get an interview about how the show went even though your putting on your make up on right now.”

Then coco replies, “how it went or how it’s going to go?”

At the end of the show everyone came back out on stage brushing their teeth which was pretty adorable. At that point I was out of p2 space so I recorded to tape and the audio came out funny so I’m hoping to get an Mp3s of the song Commonplace Feathers to cut together that video and post it later.

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Real music, with real instruments. Novel thought.

A friend Josh is in Woodpecker so I decided to go to their show and film it.Susan and I have been listening to their music pretty often while we are working on stuff and it was great to see the band and find out who sings each song. Also randomly my friend Sharon Van Etten knows the Cello player Andy because they went to elementary school together. He’s kind of my favorite in the band in a way, nothing like a solid Cello.I love all these instruments and how good they blend together. My favorite songs kick in about half way into the video. Can’t wait to here what comes out of these guys next. Susan is especially in love.To get this video download in HD Seach iTunes or Miro for “Arin Crumley” and subscribe free to my video channel there. The file can play on Apple TV and is in 720p and looks pretty amazing. And feel free to re-cut and re-post if you have a favorite song or section you want to put on your own video channel. Just make sure to link to the band.Also I’ll be posting more music and performance videos of events I go to and like. Subscribe to the RSS feed at arincrumley.com to make sure you get it all.