The response has been incredible!

We just wanted to give a shout out to all the local musicians that have been so incredibly enthusiastic about what we are doing.  It is quite frankly surprising how interested and excited everybody has been about  the raw footage clips and selected HD stills we have brought back to the venues where they were captured.  We look forward to finding out where this journey will take us and could not be more excited about the response!  We are truly grateful and we feel very blessed to have been accepted so openly.  Thank you all so much!

Here's a handful of stills from our HD video cam, a Canon VIXIA HFG10.

SEE YOU SOON!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Chris Fox & Mojo Monde - New Video!

Hey Everybody!

Here is the latest contribution from flymusicman - a new video for Chris Fox & Mojo Monde featuring Mike Bram on drums.  We had a hard time letting this one go - it was too fun and we wanted to keep tweaking but Monday morning was approaching fast and we had to get back to the real world.  We hope you enjoy watching this as much as we enjoyed making it.

Special thanks to Lucy's Lounge in Pleasantville, NY for letting us shoot there and to our good friend Artesia for letting us use her camera - and extra special thanks to ALP Productions for bringing in their big cameras to round out our 6 camera shoot of this amazing night of music.

Stay tuned for more videos, tips and behind the scenes stories as we continue our journey here at the flymusicman blog.

Chris Fox & Mojo Monde on tap! Stand by...

Here's a sneak preview of a frame from Chris Fox & Mojo Monde's upcoming video.  It promises to be an eye popper! 

 

Another Cobert Operations video: with Special Surprise Guests!

We had a great time shooting a few songs from this performance of Cobert Operations.  I was still learning what we could do with our cams at this point and had spent the day trying to figure out a better hand-held scenario.  This is the shoot with the wooden spoon as a stabilizer that I spoke about before.  Not a great way to go but an improvement none the less and the best I could come up with in a day since the first shoot, believe it or not I tried dozens of techniques.    Still it was way too shaky to watch - soooo, to try and make this amazing performance survive without causing seasickness - we decided to kick this one up a few notches by stabilizing the heck out of it in Autodesk's Flame.  Because of the sheer bulk of stabilizing needed, we employed the Furnace Plug In "Steadiness" and found various settings that seemed to work well enough - and left it at that - so it didn't turn it into a two-year project.  You can clearly see motion artifacts in the form of wobbling and smear in a lot of these shots - but believe me, they are much better this way.

That night with the wooden spoon led to a much more intensive search for the best method to get nice handheld footage.  Wait to you see what we stepped up to next.  Put it this way, my wife wants to kill me.  Ok, enough about me, check out COBERT OPERATIONS!!!!  WOOOOO-HOOOOOO!!!!!

Actually, our stabilizing insanity has already been revealead on our parallel blog, "The Fly Camera Dude" - here's the link.  How fun is this?!  OMG!

: )

So much is coming you will not believe it.

We are firing on all cylinders and are gonna pop up any day now with more wonderful goodies for your musical enjoyment pleasure.  Project x is going to be particularly tasty.  Project x  you ask?  Oh yeah, we used to use that terminology at Sony Music Studios for those special projects that were SOOO cool - we kept a lid on them.  Kinda like we are doing now - our project x is not Sony Music big but you get the idea, big deal for a small plant - it's a wonderful musical performance from one of our  local musicians for the public library in a neighboring town, we will let them announce it.  Our part was providing a second camera to capture the performance.  The library requested that we edit the show, and were hoping to do so, but were not able to fit it in so we have donated our camera's footage to the library.  The performance was amazing and we will post the link when the library gets it online.  With our Canon Vixia, there were two cameras shooting.  Our new friends at ALP Productions were there to provide a higher quality "camera 1" for the library as well.

Sony Music Studios is now gone, they tore it down to build condos.  It was on 54th street and 10th avenue and had the largest sound stage in Manhattan - "The Main Stage".  So sad, it really was an amazing place.  I was the Director of Editorial Services and the Senior Editor for almost three years and had the time of my life.  Probably should have never left.  I have some great stories - but those are all coming in the parallel blog - "Stories From My Illustrious Career".  And to mention the stories from a three year stint at Sony Music Studios before talking about the nine years working for Lorne Michael's "Broadway Video" - you KNOW those stories are gonna be good...  LOL.

Yeah, I have been very blessed - again this is why I want to give back.

Speaking of parallels, we are planning a parallel stucture to the movie about the local music scene we are hoping to do in the future as a kickstarter.com project - using all the footage we are collecting.  Wish us luck!  Kickstarter.com you ask?  Kickstarter is a group funding site for creative projects.  Check it out and fund YOUR creative project!  We will be announcing our first, smaller kickstarter project soon in an effort to help fund -- and grow -- the flymusicman project.

As we do our projects we are going to also share all our workflows on yet another blog using our Steadicam Pilot (oops, did I just let the cat out of the bag?), Cameras, Autodesk Smoke on Mac, Autodesk Flame Premium, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Creative Suite, Mocha and Mocha Pro and so much more.  Still working on the name for that blog.  We will link to all sorts of production and post visual fx training resources and user groups that you can connect with.  We are giving it all away baby!

Tell your friends and stay tuned.

 

More about this blog - and how miracles started happening.

So as you know by now I started this blog to talk about my quest to find a way to give back to the local music scene and the incredible musicians we all enjoy NIGHTLY(!) here in Westchester, New York.   Seriously, seven nights a week you can find incredible live music all over the place.   An aspiring musician myself, I had been casually shooting "video" of live music for the past few years with a variety of small cameras and a LG cell phone and the like for my own enjoyment - but recently was inspired by on of my non-local musical heros, the legendary Jason Mraz when I saw him on "The Music Edition" of "Your Business" on MSNBC.  I dare you to watch this segment on not be inspired.  I would even dare to say it might even change your life - like it did for me.  Here's the story.   

Jason's music had kept me going through the hard times of the recent economic downturn -- as any of the ex-employees and clients from the now-defunct SoundHound on 45th street in NYC can tell you, Jason's toe-tapping happy sound was in heavy rotation at the plant during those dark days.  (FLYfx was subletting a vfx suite from SoundHound as the bad economy proceeded to crush us.)  Now, several years later and on this quest - and, incidentally after our best year ever(!) - I happened upon Jason's inspiring message on the MSNBC show - in this segment he speaks about Passion, respect, practicing gratitude and being inspired and inspiring others - well that was all it took, I ordered my first HD camera that same hour.  A light bulb had gone on above my head.  I suddenly had a plan.

Thanks Jason, you've done it again bro.

So there I was, I had upped the anti with a fairly serious semi-professionl Hi Def camera and some lights - and had, in a flash decided I was going to bring my 25 years of television production and post production experience to the local musicians that inspire so many of us in my home town area.  After all, it was related to my business and I realized as Jason spoke, that this could EASILY work to help me generate business for FLYfx - the passion I had for the local musicians alone would generate good vibes all around, and I believe that good vibes equals good business.  Not that I am not a "miracle guy" by any means, but the funny thing is, actual miracles have been happening - literally one a day, at least, ever since I started really going for it - just a few short weeks ago.  So now I have decided to call this whole effort "helping yourself by helping others".

The first night out with my camera:  I just showed up at a bar called Katie Mac's in Mt. Kisco - where I knew "Chris Fox and Mojo Monde" were performing - to ask if I could shoot some video.  I had an LED camera light, my brand new Canon VIXIA HFG10 and an Opteka X-Grip to mount and fly them on - all hand held - and really just to test the gear and see if I even felt comfortable intruding on these world class performers - I will literally never forget how nice it was to get a warm greeting from Jon Cobert  when he looked up and said "Hey there's Ralph".  I had "friended" Jon on FaceBook after meeting him and getting my mind absolutely blown by his incredible talent over the past months - so he knew who I was.  Jon made me feel "comfortable enough" to go for it - I knew we were all in for a real treat.  Denny McDermott was on the drums and Tony Tino on bass - they were incredible, Chris with his usual dazzling array of uber-tasty guitar licks and incredible singing and Jon Cobert destroying his Nord Electro3 all the while singing perfect harmonies.

And there I was, struggling to keep my shots from going haywire with my new gear.  I really was not a worthy cameraman by any means.  Not with this rig anyway.

I shot a few songs as best I could - my framing was pretty awesome, cause I AM a tv pro, but the steadiness left much to be desired.  I could really use a better way to stabilize this puppy or at least a second camera to cut out the really bad parts.  Jon invited me to come shoot the next night when his band, "Cobert Operations" was scheduled to rock Lucy's Lounge in Pleasantville(!), a few towns over.  I excitedly agreed but knew I had to improve my game.

Some tech notes:  I chose the Canon VIXIA HFG10 because of its ability to natively capture at a framerate of 23.98, a professionals choice for that organic steppy film vibe so when I went to grab my GoPro2 to use as a second camera I was faced with a cam that could only capture 30 fps in full HD - there is an option to shoot at 48 fps at a lower res but I decided instead to ask my friend to shoot with his iPhone 4 - hopefully at 24fps.  I later learned that his footage framerate would vary with the level of light - something I could fix with the FLYfx arsenal of high end post gear at my disposal but the average consumer might not be so lucky.  A great little iPhone app called FILMic Pro would later fix our frame rate issues on future shoots as well as offer some other nifty options to the iPhones incredible little camera, I highly recommend it.  $2.99 at the App Store.  LOL!!!

The second night out with the camera:  "Cobert Operations" has the famous Peter Calo on guitar, Jon on keys, world renown bassist Stu Woods and Rob Wallis on drums plus several amazing guest performers made it a magical night.

There was also one very special guest floating around in the audience - a man with an iPhone, also shooting video.  As it turns out, this second iPhone cameraman was a world class Director of Photography (day two - miracle number two) who is friends with the  guitarist, Peter Calo.  I chased Alan down after the show and begged him for access to his footage for the edit - he liked my enthusiasm and determination a lot apparently.  Cool.  We spoke several times on the phone after that and he volunteered to come to the next shoot(!) and bring a camera or two...

Third night out with the camera:  Man was "Chris Fox and Mojo Monde" gonna be surprised when I show up with this guy.  I did not make any announcement because it was snowing heavily that day but Alan showed up anyway -- with two cameras AND an assistant.  The cameras?  Oh just a Sony Ex1 and an EX3 - HOLY SMOKING HI DEF, BATMAN!

This night, Chris Fox and Mojo Monde had Mike Bram on the drums - who was recently the drummer and musical director for JASON MRAZ.  WHAT THE EFF?!?!?  
 

I gotta call this, third night, third miracle.  You people getting this?  I HAD CHILLS Y'ALL!!!  And speaking of chill, MIKE WAS AWESOME!!!!  He lit up the room and was such a joy to listen to and watch I seriously have not stopped smiling.  My wife thinks I have lost my mind.  I cannot tell you how excited I am that we are cutting a few of these songs - soon to be released by the band with Mike in the back blowing minds along with Tony Tino and of course, Jon Cobert and Chris Fox.  

Y'all ain't ready for this, that's all I have to say.    

Alan, had told me during the week that he got a kick out of me balancing my X-Grip mounted VIXIA with a wooden spoon I took from my kitchen drawer as my preferred stabilizing techniques to help fly my little camera around the room.  Imagine how silly I felt.  More on stabilizing my cam coming soon.  In this pic you can see our second camera man, my good friend Rich.

I should have realized Alan wasn't fooling around, even his iPhone camera had a telephoto lens on it.  How cool is that?

I consider these local musicians "my people".  In my most enthusiastic moments I can imagine this concept spreading like a "pay it forward" kind of thing.  So with this blog and my other activities I hope to encourage others to help those who they consider "their people" - in ways that ultimately help themselves.  It's simple - TRY IT!!!  Think of someone you identify with - then think of a way you can help them with YOUR unique skill.  Because it's YOUR skill your will easily find creative ways to benefit, not to mention the positive energy generated - it's like exercising your entrepreneurial muscles with steroids. 

Really, Try it.  Then tell me how your creativity starts to flow.  Let me know how you feel lighter and more motivated.  If you are like me, people will sense that you are onto something, everything around you will seem to change and bend to help you as you help others.  Really, let me know - I am curious to know if you find the universe handing daily miracles to you too.

Passion.  Respect. Gratitude. Be inspired and inspire others.

Thanks again Jason.



(Some photos taken by John Apicelli with his permission.)