Vog #4 is of last week when I was almost late for my radio show. Instead of just making it a doco/blog post piece, I played with the medium a little.

On one level the video takes me through various stages, or doors to get closer to the show. Not in real time though, instead it compresses about 15 minutes into 1 minute.

The audio however compresses about 3 minutes into 1 minute, and starts and ends when the video does, the last scene in fact synchronising them. The soundtrack is actually a recording of the radio show, not the on camera audio, and goes through incremental filter changes at each door I go through, which is supposed to give the impression of getting closer and closer to the sound source, or the show. I did a first version without this, just the high quality audio, and the whole clip seemed like a music video and was very pacy, which wasn’t too bad, but fairly boring. (For the techos, I used a decrementing high pass filter at about 15K, 9K, 6K, 3K, 1K and 300Hz respectively.)

The song is a cover of My Boyfriend’s Back by the Spazzys, and just happened to be the song we played before we came into our first voice break for the show. The track is actually 2 minutes 40 seconds long, so I removed a verse, two choruses, part of the lead break, and shortened the closing crescendo, bringing it down to roughly a minute.

Anyway, enjoy.

I played around with video again on the weekend, and the result is vog #2, Singleton Lets Loose, about our Synop mascot, Singleton the kangaroo/wallaby. I was determined to make something that could only work in the medium, and I think I’ve succeeded. It is also pretty crap, but at least I got to play.

I wanted to play with Final Cut Pro, and this is the result of a few hours of mucking around. I tried to use FCP for my previous vog post, but I’d forgotten how to use it, so I stuck with iMovie.

Anyway, I shot a few minutes of footage at work, without thinking I’d actually use it for anything, and then when I downloaded it I realised the sound was recorded by the built in camera mic. At least it allowed me to play with the FCP EQ and pass filters, but the result is still pretty bad. The scenes with Victor, Cordo and the shredder/printer are the only ones with original audio, the rest is dubbed by one of my dodgey voices, the one I usually use for little kid, and some additional music.

After recording the voice, I had to match the original room’s reverb (see Sound — the most experiential fingerprint of a 3 dimensional space for more on how sound affects recordings) with the reverb in FCP, to limited success. The controller in FCP (v3 at least) is fairly restrictive, and assuming it isn’t just my rushed mixing, you can hear how the dubbed voice doesn’t exactly match that of the real actors.

Finally, add a couple video fades and transitions, opening and closing titles, and a few other audio tweeks, and it’s done.

So assuming the cast of Singleton, Victor and Cordo approve, and haven’t made me remove it, grab it from the enclosure, and tell me what you think.