First Day Filming
Friday, February 20th, 2009My friend, Adam Roper, came to visit for a few days and we wanted to experiment with making some videos similar to the blogotheque style. If you’ve never seen a blogotheque video, go to www.blogotheque.net right now and be inspired (you can also type “blogotheque” in the search on youtube). I can’t say that our day of filming was a major success, but we had a lot of fun and learned a fair bit about filming.
We just wandered around the city and spontaneously shot footage of me playing some songs.
We actually had a meeting with a former professor of ours, Nelson Boschman, and on our way to the coffee shop, I played “Shame on Me” in the back of the city bus. Then after hanging out with Nelson for a bit, we wandered down to the beach and I played “More of Myself Without You” on top of a boulder that sits under a city art piece. That one didn’t work very well, so we searched the area for a new location. I saw a cool mural on the wall of an alleyway and wanted to shoot there, but we almost got hit by a truck, so we decided against it and just started heading to my house. On the way, we stopped at a skytrain station and shot “Tired Eyes”. The train dominated the sound as it came it, but it looked pretty cool. The other downside was that some chauch dove in front of the camera as he got off the train. Somehow that didn’t get caught on tape though. As we continued heading toward my apartment, we saw a violinist busking at Waterfront station. He was really good, so I asked if he would jam with me for a few minutes. We played “Numbed” together. He was a nice guy. I think he said his name is David. He had a thick foreign accent that I couldn’t pinpoint. Finally after a short sea-bus ride to the north shore, we walked up to the look-out and filmed me playing “Won’t Wake Up”.
When we got to my place we uploaded the videos and watched them over a late lunch. The sound quality wasn’t great and there were some things to be learned about simplicity with videography, but we had so much fun and it was an adventure. Perhaps art is supposed to be adventurous – breaking forth into unmarked territory with creative attempts.
