AV Challenge 2: Part One, Making the Clips

As part of the AV Challenge, I decided to document my process. I’m new to this AV Performance thing, and it’s great to have people who are figuring it out along with me. I have no idea how this will turn out – I’m going to take it one step at a time and see where I wind up.

So for this first part, I had to find something related to ‘water’ to videotape. Thankfully, there’s a fountain right near my office (the one at the Grove for any Los Angeles readers). I always carry my little camera around in my man-bag, so on the way to work one morning I stopped by the fountain and videotaped it like all the other tourists.

After work, I transferred the vids over to my laptop, brought them into Final Cut and started cutting them up to short clips – I specifically looked for ones that had rather defined movement, which would help in matching them up with audio.

Next, I decided to spice up my clips a little bit. The colors on my lil camera are alright, but nothing to write home about. I fired up some color-correction tools and made the water a bit more aqua to help it pop on-screen. Then I used a combination of the contrast tool and the trusty ol’ Kaleidescope to abstract the clips a bit.

Since I took the video in a public place, I knew on-location audio recording was out. So once I had a nice selection of clip possibilities, I opened up Ableton Live.

In Ableton, I fooled around with a free subtractive synth I’d found called Automat. Once I had a sound I liked, I made up a few patterns, and then started flipping back and forth between Final Cut and Ableton live to see what might match up. When I found a pair that looked close, I would fine-tune it a bit in Ableton, and then export it to Final Cut. Rinse and Repeat.

After about an hour, I had sounds for all my Final Cut clips. I lined them up, trimmed the clips to match the sound lengths (making sure that the first frame of video started on the sound) and set up a Batch Export.

My specs:
640×480
Motion-JPEG B at about 85% Quality
Linear PCM Audio

Once done, I uploaded them to archive.org and compiled all the clips into the AV Challenge #2 Clip Packs.

In Part Two (coming soon) – I’ll load the clips up and start making beats and melodies!