Operation: ViddyCap is Complete!

A project that has been on the Book of Work for MNI Heavy Industries (LLC) for MANY years has finally been complete.

The goal was to transfer the entire Stickmen/MNI video archive from tape to PC. When I moved to Ohio two years ago, I took the entire archive with me, along with my trusty Digital8 camera and a firewire cable with the dream of doing this in my free time. After all, surely, within two years, I would find the time to do a simple task like transfer a few dozen tapes to the computer.

Wrong.

So when I returned to SoCal, I was hit by a new wave of enthusiasm. I dedicated myself to finishing the project, and sure enough, within a couple short weeks, it was all done.

Yes, the ENTIRE video archive is now digital. It all fits on a 1.5 tb hard drive. I really think a lot of it was just the timing. Had I started this two years ago, I probably would have needed to spend an additional 500 dollars on storage. But today, for 80 bucks at Costco, you can get that huge drive that houses the entire thing.

This means that the first barrier to the production of "Stickmen The Movie" has been relieved. Where we go from here, time will only tell.

It's A Lizard!

Ok, so this is not album related. I get that. I was goofing around on my computer tonight, and ended up doing a little video capture project. I stumbled onto the 8mm tape of "operation mexicali", which seemed like a good candidate for capture.

What was surprising was what was at the beginning of the tape.



This was really just a fun exercise to see if I could learn how to automate volume within a clip. I did.

And this is also meant to fuel Bill's fire to eventually make "Stickmen: The Movie"

For those of you who do not understand the historical significance of this clip, don't feel bad. There's probably only five or six people in the world that do.

Impressive, Most Impressive

I have not been blogging much over here, so it's a true treat to see some SERIOUSLY deep archival material surfacing. "Classic stickmen" indeed. Not only is that picture da bomb (yo), but so is that list of all gigs. Is that really ALL gigs, both real and imagined??

Amazing stuff Bill Fischer. Glad to see that after all these years, your role as band archivist is still being treated with the urgency and necessity that it deserves. Great stuff man.

Now go build an airplane!

Time To Declare This Year's Theme

After a phone call to Bill this evening, I think it's safe to say that 2009 will be the Year of Stickmen: The Movie.

The technology is all in place, the 2008 album project was recorded on schedule, so it's time to bite off more than we can chew. What better way to do that than to finally put together a movie idea that has been kicking around in the back of Bill's head for twenty years now.

Though the format of the movie has yet to be ironed out, one this is for sure: it will include interviews and concert footage.

And speaking of concert footage, it's only fair that I drop this one on you:



I actually did not know this existed until tonight. I've been editing together this performance from two different cameras, and it wasn't until I was watching the final product that I noticed this song was included. How did I miss it??? Well, the last 10 minutes of the concert are missing the center camera footage. My guess is the battery konked out or something. This means that I had no need to plow through that footage during the editing phase, as there was nothing I could do with it. So I missed this very rare recording of "Drinks Are On Me". I think this was the only time we ever performed it, and after this, Von Darner put the kaibosh on ever playing it again.

Good news is that we've got it recorded here, and I think Bill and I could reproduce it in the studio.

Stickmen: The Movie - Proof of Concept

Adobe Premier has this neat little feature called Multi-Camera Edit, which basically lets you switch camera angle by just doing one mouse click. I have some footage of a UCI concert that was filmed by two cameras, so I lined them up in Premier, and played around with this feature. Here is the result:



I think it turned out pretty good, though frankly, the switching back and forth is not that visually interesting. Though it is about FIFTY times more interesting than a single, static camera shot, it's not quite what I hoped it would be. To muddy the thinking further, it just so happened that one of the cameras was being moved around during this particular song, which makes "Camera A" a more interesting than it is for the rest of the show. This song is not really representative of the rest of the concert for this reason.

Still, it was a fun little experiment, and really didn't take much time at all to put together. There really aren't that many concerts where we shot with multiple cameras, but there are a couple. Should make for some interesting editing opportunities.


Oh, and we finished recording the new album too.