Second Sun: "Slow City" Video
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The 404 448: Where we somehow fit Family of the Year in our studio
They said it couldn't be done, but we managed to fit an entire Family in our 12x 12-foot studio; and besides, The 404 Podcast has never been that great at following orders. Today's episode welcomes Vanessa, Joe, Sebastian, James, Christina, and Brent from the band Family of the Year, who submit themselves to a chat about their new EP Where's the Sun, new music marketing 2.0, Bogie Ogretrons, which band member has the longest legs, and what it's like to share a shower with six other people in a tiny RV touring across the country.
The second promo for Panic Cell for the track "Save Me", became the most voted for promo in the history of the rock satellite channel Scuzz, remaining in the top ten for eighteen weeks and at number one for six weeks. This was another three day shoot starting with the band performance. We wanted to shoot them in a confined metallic space like a shipping container with very low light. Unfortunately the logistics of filming in a freight container were too great so we came up with the idea of using the back of a truck. The truck we had in mind was too expensive to hire so we used the AFM lighting truck. We dressed the interior and hung 40 light bulbs only three of which were actually live, then cheated the band around into different positions to give the feeling of an enclosed space. The interiors were shot in the bathroom and living room of my flat and were lit by Tim, the master of understatement, with one kino tube and a bit of reflective milar. The exteriors were shot in a drainage pit at the bottom of a field in east sussex. The week before the shoot I'd dug a hole and sunk a plastic barrel into the side of the pit, the idea being we would stand our actor in it then fit a kind of sleeve around his waste and dress the earth around him. Unfortunately the barrel filled with freezing water. Add to that, he was topless and it was January. We shot quickly.
Panic Cell decided to re-release "Away From Here" as a follow up to Thousand Words. As the band's look had changed they needed a new video for this re-mixed version. Set in a club during Panic Cell's performance, the narrative follows a girl as she meets her apparent assailant. We had an industrial niteclub location in mind when writing the script but decided to recreate the club in a studio which was logistically beneficial and kept costs down. We hired the loading bay at Black Island Studios. The set for the narrative was built adjacent to the bay where the band were performing, enabling crew to jump between sets so the band's performance could be shot while the actors were going through make up changes. We achieved the look for the club by using long lenses and low key lighting, shooting on an Arri 435 from Panavision so we could easily adjust the shutter angle between shots. Robin Brigham had lit the original version and has a great gift for getting creative under pressure, managing to keep up with our tight shooting schedule. Our two production dynamos Carolyn and Isy sourced actors Jennifer Glyn and Danny George who's parts were pre-blocked and rehearsed enabling efficient shooting. The whole shoot was storyboarded and planned down to the last detail in order to accommodate the amount of set ups. We used Panic Cell's fans as extras to add to the realism of the club. A free bar as part of the set was unfortunately derogatory to their behaviour but despite alcohol induced issues the extras did a great job and we shot as planned with long lenses to create the illusion of a larger crowd. For practical reasons all the scenes with the extras were shot first. The flashbacks of Jennifer getting ready were filmed in a house in Wimbledon. Danny wasn't available so Yan body doubled during the exterior attack scenes which were shot in the back garden. Finally we dragged poor shivering Jennifer into a nearby alley to shoot her post attack scenes, covering her in a blanket between takes. Robin lit this sequence with one sungun maintaining the high contrast look of the club interiors, shooting everything wide open on the lens which gave us a very shallow depth of field. Dave at Framestore provided us with another superb grade and once we finished the cut, the final stage was the subtle CG sequence as Jen turns into a vampire. Chris Shaw created a rough transition, tracking vampire eyes and teeth onto Jen's face. He had planned to do a more detailed version but the first one worked really well as the sequence only lasts for a second, so we used this in the final cut. More information is available at www.visualabuse.com
The Constantines: "Nightime/Anytime, It's Alright"
When the Constantines headlined the Sub Pop showcase at the 2004 SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas; the band's show concluded with them standing on the speaker stacks clapping and keeping time for the audience as the room sang the band's recent set closer (Lou Reed's "Temporary Thing") back at them. This scene lasted a full five minutes, five minutes of finale without the band playing a single note and thus the increasingly impatient promoters, fearful of running over their strict Texan curfew, couldn't even unplug the band to get them off the stage. But then the purpose of the stage is constantly called into question at Constantines shows. Bryan and Steve will regularly move their mic stands into the crowd and Doug frequently hands out percussion to the faithful gathered together near the band. The greatest rock and roll is always transformative, a concept that the Constantines grasped from their inception and one which was so readily on display at this show. The boundary between band and crowd is blurred; inhibitions are lost, along with voices, and ultimately you feel more alive than you did before the band took the stage, before you stopped noticing the stage.
The brief, brief from the band for this song was "lapdancers" which became a man obsessed with a lap dancer. Just so long as it involved the band and a lapdancing club. So we came up with the idea of a man so consumed with rage that it ultimately becomes his salvation..and er..some lapdancers. The shoot began in a nite club in Margate, Kent, co-owned by one of the bands brothers, however the nitemare began a few hours earlier, when at 4pm our lead actress had to pull out leaving us four hours to find a replacement who would be prepared to come to Margate and pole dance in front of a bunch of strangers all night for free. Further more our first A.D was on a shoot and over running. Many frantic calls and emails later the planets aligned and we found Joceline, an actress and model, who as luck would have it lived moments away from the studio where our first A.D had just wrapped. So off we all convoyed down to the coast. We arrived at the nite club at 11 to start shooting at midnight only to find out that it closed at 2am. The sunrise was at 4am so this left us two hours to shoot. We threw half the storyboard in the sea. The club cleared an area upstairs so we could shoot close ups of the dancers, meanwhile our extras got stuck into the free bar. Unfortunately our extras idea of smart dress wasn't quite the same as ours, so we wrangled the four guys who did wear suits into the front of every shot. The bar was cleared by 2.30am and we were done by 5am following some sneeky lighting miracles to cheat the threat of impending daylight that was creeping through the windows. More information is available at www.visualabuse.com
From CES 2007, we take a look at the Vizio VM60P. This 60-inch, 720p plasma television has a bronze exterior finish and is nicely priced.
Pop Dolls, a post experimental synth rock band, has exploded onto the "pop goes bang" era. The band combines anthematic beats, mood-accommodating tunes, and a slight twist of dark 80's dance lyrics.
The Pop Dolls single handedly, self-recorded, produced, and released "Made In Plastic" in July 2005. Lick The Pop!
Second Sun: "Through Each Kinder Day"
We began by shooting the band against black over four hours in the lighting company AFM's test studio. Tim hung Kinoflow tubes from the ceiling and exposed only for the lamp so as to give the appearance of floating strips of light. The initial idea was to then film the band in a dense wood and dissolve between the two, however when we got to the location the next day the fields around it had turned into a lake, so we abandoned that idea and moved to a nearby service bridge over the A3. We set the band up on the bridge and drove our three cars backwards and forwards past the band at break neck speed through an eight foot gap between them and the camera and with a 30 ft stopping distance, otherwise they'd be in the hedge. I then cut it to try and give the the illusion of the band playing on a motorway. Originally the promo was to be more story lead showing the relationship between a man and a woman breaking down. We filmed this in Battersea Park and on the North bank of the Thames on a 16mm Bolex but had serious light leak issue. So, being on a budget of zero pounds, reshooting was out of the question. We salvaged the best of the footage and cut it in around the performance.
2007 New York auto show: Infiniti EX Crossover
The newest member of Infiniti's Crossover SUVs, the EX has a very clean exterior style and includes fascinating new video technology, which uses cameras to get a bird's-eye view of the car. Get a First Look from the 2007 New York auto show.
Fujifilm's FinePix F60fd is a nice full-featured compact camera, if you can overlook its slow shooting speed.
