Ghosts, Music Video, Drumming – Light Painting

The post took a  while to compose, but it is my latest update for my learning project – Light Painting/Photography.

I started off by creating some ghosts.

   

Then as I was trying to find some inspiration and videos from YouTube about light photography, I discovered Kaki King:

“Kaki King’s childhood passions were the drums and Brit-pop, and she figured if she ever made it big it would be because of her skills behind the kit. However, her musical talents didn’t stop there: she also played the guitar, and though she learned Beatles and Fleetwood Mac songbooks, she found herself drawn to the styles of Preston Reed and Michael Hedges. Moving from Atlanta to New York to attend college, King got her first taste of solo guitar performance thanks to campus open-mike nights, and upon graduation in 2001 she decided to pursue the instrument more seriously. She started playing in subways, a venue that helped her develop her percussive technique, and when passengers would ask her if she had CDs, she realized that she could possibly make a living as a musician.”

Throughout the following video, light painting and stop-frame animation are techniques used:

 

and then I saw this one which describes how they created the light painting shown in the video – which is fairly detailed and I found it to be interesting.

 

I was inspired by the music video, and decided to create a video. Here are the steps I went through:

1. I found a picture from when I was in honour band during high school.
2. Then I took a photograph of myself sitting on a chair, there just happens to also be a guitar in the beside me. Coincidence??
3. I drew music notes, a drum and drum sticks using the technique of light painting.
4. I opened all of these photographs in Adobe Photoshop and started putting multiple images together.
5. VirtualDrumming – a website that features a virtual drum set which lets you play sounds on a drum. I simply recorded the rhythm I wanted using my laptop’s  microphone.
6. I needed to edit my drum recording,  so I downloaded Power Sound – a free sound editor. This program was fairly simple to use in terms of cutting up parts of the track and moving beats around. I only used it for a short period of time, but found it was fairly limited in that you could only have one track. However, there were audio effects and sound quality tools available. I would only use this tool to rearrange one track at a time if I was going to be putting multiple tracks together to create a song. I had forgotten that I had Audactity which is a better audio editing tool that lets you have multiple tracks and many effects.
7. Then switched programs to Windows Movie Maker to create a video with stop-frame animation which is composed of several photographs that change within one second or less. Here, I combined my images and the drum sounds to produce my video.
8. I used Freesound (a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds. Browse, download and share sounds) to download the intro music to my video. – One should note that you have to create a free account before you can download sounds.