Every year Google does something funny for my birthday. Everyone thinks it’s for April Fool’s day, but I know Google knows everything about me, including my birthday & what color socks I am wearing today. It stands to reason that they know of my love of video games as well, and this year they made this!

Hilarious. They even made 8 bit versions of street view, complete with little avatar.

Hop to this, at the time of post there is only 24 hours left to pre-order!

Part one of a series of posts about making a music video.

I’ve decided to write a series of posts about my newest project, a video for We Are Hex’s “Bottom of My Belly” from their record “Gloom Boom.” I’m fortunate to be collaborating with talented folks from Larry Ladig Photography, Hi Def Pics, and Birkhead Editorial.

From the band’s website: “We Are Hex is a messy pile of pop slop… booming keyboards, precise and spaced out guitar, blown out bass, led by a barrage of drums . The rhythmic vocals pace themselves with the kick, conveying sex and sadness. The lyrics are deceptively self-aware in their simplicity.”

The record is crazy good, and I highly recommend you get it from their BandCamp site.

How I Found Myself Accidentally Doing What I’d always wanted to Do

I’ve always loved music, and I’ve always loved music videos. I didn’t have MTV growing up, but we had VH1, and many an afternoon was spent watching Phil Collins videos. My foray into creating music videos, however,  started with my own band, Thin Fevers.  In the spring of 2008, for some reason we decided we needed to enter a music video contest, so we ended up with this simple, but great video for “Idiot Archipelago.” Part “Take On Me” and part “Godzilla,” it was a lot of fun, and we shot and cut it in a very long, hot day.

After that I found myself doing some live work with Jookabox, and that landed me a quick gig making another video for the (at the time) solo artist.

These project were great, especially great considering their “we have a camera and some lights, lets screw around” approach. For “Bottom of My Belly” I’ve approached the project very deliberately, planning, story-boarding, and collaborating. I have no desire to pigeonhole myself, so I’ve been spending a lot time with graph paper and a little time with Final Cut Pro to get a sketch going.

In my next post I will be sharing some of my storyboards and talking about how I’ve dove into this project. I’d love to hear feedback on these pieces in the comments and find out if there any specifics people reading may want to know. This is going to be an exciting project, and something that I think will end up being a really cool piece of work.

I’m not sure what it is, but I am in love with cheap software based Andy Warhol effects and making this site look like a comic book. This might be the closest I have been to what I was wanting to do in the first place.

SYNERGIZE!

Almost as good as Gerald. Original found at WikiMedia Commons.

Below you will find screen shots of a project I am working on for Birkhead Editorial. The client and I are very pleased with the results of our hard work, but we would like to ask for feedback from the infinite peanut gallery that is the internet.

Some background:

Birkhead Editorial is a Hi Definition editorial service helmed by Andrew Birkhead. Andrew is a seasoned story teller who’s mantra is to “Add Value” and his mission to “Make people, places, and projects better with my storytelling, compassion and passion.”

Please sound off in the comments. Does this site extend Birkhead Editorial’s brand? Does it portray Andrew’s mantra or mission? Does it entice you to explore? Can you find what you are looking for?

Some technical information:

This site will be built with WordPress, and we will be using Vimeo to host all of the video work with a plus account so each piece can be viewed in Hi Definition.

I am looking forward to feedback. I will be starting the the build next week and will update with links when the site is live. Thanks for checking it out!