Music, videos and other animals

[geckosmith]

https://soundcloud.com/joeasmith/rend-collective-you-bled-geckosmith-rework

[geckosmith]

Location, location, location.

While I was at Reading University I made a few videos with Andrew Parsons (not the guy from Mock the Week) for the Christian Union there. Working with Andrew was a lot of fun. He provided a lot of the creativity and I helped out with the technical skills needed to make videos. We made the video above for UCCF (the organisation that coordinates most of the Christian Unions for universities in the country) to show at a conference called New Word Alive back in 2009.

We actually had to scrap our first attempt as the cemetery we'd chosen was under a flight path and with the combination of noise from planes and the high wind the audio was useless. We definitely learned some lessons about choosing locations from that exercise. Watching this back, I'm a little shocked at how bad YouTube quality was back then!

[geckosmith]

Starting Point Reading

Starting Point is a charity based in Reading that provides support for young people not in education, employment or training through mentoring and work experience. I had the opportunity to film this video for them. The editing was done by the very talented Liam Camps (of Alpha video fame). The great thing about making videos like this is that you get to meet the people impacted by the work of charities in our town and hear first-hand how their lives are being changed.

Technically, this one came with the challenges of filming in fading light, with intermittent rain, next to a railway line but it came out well. I was impressed with the microphone's (Rode Videomic) ability to just pick up what I was pointing it at. Also, this was the first video outing for my Canon EOS 650D. Hello HD!

[geckosmith]

Alpha at Reading Family Church

My very talented friend Liam Camps has produced this video for Reading Family Church's upcoming Alpha course. Not only is it a very professional looking video but it's also advertising a great course. If you're interested in attending the Alpha Course at Reading Family Church then you can get more details here.

[geckosmith]

Twenty One Pilots (The Live Room)

I saw this band perform on some of the BBC Reading festival coverage. So thought I'd Google them and found these sessions. There is so much energy in their performance. I have never seen a drummer move so much. Well, apart from this guy.

[geckosmith]

Marwell Wildlife Park

Here are my favourite three photos from mine and Abi’s trip to Marwell Wildlife park last month.

[geckosmith]

Bon Iver - I can't make you love me (Bonnie Raitt cover)

I came across this as part of a longer video of Bon Iver at AIR Studios. 2 pianos, 2 vocals, tonnes of talent. It's one of those tracks that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. It took me back to the first time I heard Re:stacks. It was on the radio late one night while I was driving home through heavy fog. I nearly hit 2 deer and a stag, but let's not talk about that... If you've got half an hour to spare then watch the full session below. 

[geckosmith]

Cass Lowe - Birthmark

Many years ago I had the good fortune of seeing Newton Faulkner play in London, supported by the Script and Cass Lowe. Despite him being on first, I think the stand out moment of the show for me was Cass Lowe's looped mash-up of Lovecats by the Cure and Dreaming of you by the Coral. So I said hello after the gig and grabbed a signed copy of his current demo. I've been closely following his musical endeavours ever since, which seem to have been mostly production and writing for others (the list of acts he's worked with seems endless). However this week, at last he's released some of his own material. Enjoy.

[geckosmith]

Prague

Not too long ago, Abi and I took a holiday to Prague. Fortunately they removed the flood related state of emergency a few days before we travelled and the weather took a u-turn, shooting up to the high 30s. Anyway, here are some of the more abstract photos we took. It seems the Czech's like padlocks too.

[geckosmith]

Shhhh, this is a library...

I'm a big fan, as you may have noticed, of Blogotheque's videos. Every so often they do one that's a just a little bit cooler than the others. This is one of those. Who would have thought that a band playing in a library would look so good. To be fair, it's a nice looking library. I don't think it would look the same in my local library.

[geckosmith]

Leah McFall, doing rather well for herself.

For those who've been following my blog for a little while now, you may remember me writing about Leah McFall. Some of the more observant amongst you may have also spotted her on TV recently. She's currently doing very well on 'The Voice' on BBC 1 (obviously nothing to do with the fact I blogged about her). You can check out her latest performance here. It needs no introduction, it very much speaks for itself. Anyway, she's through to the last 12 vocalists in the competition and you can vote for her this Friday night. Go on, you know you want to.

For now, above is a video from Leah's youtube channel of her performing one of her own songs. I'm hoping with her success on the Voice we'll be seeing plenty more of Leah's own material in the years to come.

[geckosmith]

Active Child - Hanging On.

I've been fairly quiet for a while. I've got a number of ideas for video and music projects floating around and a couple partially started but until any of them are nearer completion this page may look fairly empty. So I thought I'd share a video of an artist I discovered a number of months ago. Every so often I stumble upon a track that makes me want to move all my recording gear and instruments to a cabin in the woods with some friends (Bon Iver style but less lonely) and just create music. To me this is one of those tracks. The artist is Active Child. Enjoy.

[geckosmith]

Serving the town of Reading and beyond...

I produced this video for Reading Family Church's 10th Anniversary. The brief for the video was to 'interview' people and representatives from organisations that the church supported to give a snapshot of how RFC serves the town of Reading and beyond. This was a lot of fun to do. Abi and James helped out with sound, lighting, carrying equipment and helpfully timing the buses passing on London Street to get audio recorded before the next one. It was great to meet so many people who were genuinely grateful for the support of RFC and to hear real stories of how the support of the church was making a difference in peoples lives in our town.

From a technical point of view, it was another opportunity to be creative with Adobe After Effects. There are no presets in there. All the motion, positioning and layering of different elements had to be set manually. It takes a while but it's very rewarding when it all works. I had the opportunity to use an HD camera for most of the filming. The camera only had a 17 minute HD recording capacity which made things interesting. We had to really plan our filming so we could dump the footage to a hard disk at the right times. 

This is only part one, you can view part two here.

[geckosmith]

Apparently SLRs can take photos too...

For Christmas, Abi and I got a digital SLR. I'm looking forward to making some HD videos with it but until then we're learning to use it for photography. Here are some photos from our recent holiday in Italy.

[geckosmith]

Woh, woh, woh....This is not my Batman glass...

This is another video I help produce a while ago (9 years ago to be precise). Much like the Hug Me video, we made this as an introduction to a youth worship event we were involved in. Just a bit of fun to get people laughing. It was the idea of my older brother Adam, who wrote the script based on the 1960s series of Batman.

Batman and Robin were played by my brothers Adam and Luke. Various friends played the other parts. Our Mum made all the costumes. Which I'm still very impressed by. Better than anything we could have bought off the internet. I stayed off camera mostly, directing, filming and editing it all together.

This was the first scripted video I had done. I really enjoyed it. It gave us the time to really plan what we wanted to film and how to do it. Episode 1 and Episode 2 were filmed roughly a year apart, so the quality difference is quite noticeable. Episode 1 was edited with Windows Movie Maker. By Episode 2 I'd moved on to Sony Vegas and bought an external  microphone, which was a huge leap forward. 

A few years after we made it a friend convinced me to put it up on youtube. Somehow the first part has had 80,182 hits since then. Even more bizarrely, one of the out-take videos has had over 170,000 hits. Which is something like 90 hits a day for 5 years. Seriously, it's not that good.

Anyway, the video above is part 1 of 4 of Episode 1. If you've got the stamina, there's 2 episodes up on youtube. Just bear in mind...this was 9 years ago...

[geckosmith]

After Effects - In at the deep end.

Having spent time dipping in and out of Adobe After Effects through out my year working for Reading Family Church, towards the end of the year I decided to create a video almost totally in After Effects. It was a good chance to stretch my, at the time, basic knowledge of After Effects and also push the limits of the office computer. Overnight rendering is not the future. However, with a fast enough computer, After Effects is! 

For anyone who's getting into using After Effects and hasn't discovered the wonders of Video Copilot. Firstly, where have you been?! Secondly, check it out!

[geckosmith]

Chet Faker 

Maybe I'm just drawn in by my love for the tone of Wurlitzers and Rhodes pianos but I'm really enjoying Chet Faker's live sessions at the moment.