TAZM PICTURES

So I spent a couple of days flying around in a plane for no reason (don’t ask).   The not-to-be named airline which ferries Dutch troops back and forth to Kandahar go out of their way to spend pretty much all their time handing out food (2 meals in a 6-hour flight, and 2 each in two 4-hour flights), and they also give out portable digital movie players which are normally reserved only in Comfort Class (for their paying customers).  But frankly you come to a point when you’ve had enough food, you’ve seen all the movies, and you’ve read the free newspaper and the in-flight magazine.  Now what?

Fortunately, I happened to be carrying a couple of my favorite gadgets (I like gadgets) in my gray-digital-camouflage work clothes, which my Uncle (Sam) graciously equips with lots and lots of pockets for just that sort of thing.  And as we began to dip toward the clouds that blanketed the area around Eindhoven, the Netherlands I realized I was in the prime seat for catching a good view of the setting sun.  I positioned my Flip Camera as best I could against the window, and as we descended through what must have been five or six separate layers of clouds, each with gaps that allowed various shades of sunlight to spill through in odd patterns, I got the working parts of a pretty cool (I think) video:

It’s pretty wobbly at times, and the scratches and dust on the window are at times distracting, but I still think it’s pretty cool.  You don’t see sights like that too often – in the early parts where the top third of the video is dark, that’s actually the top layer of clouds, but it almost looks like it’s filmed from much higher.  And I asked the flight crew to PLEEEEEASE make the plane stop shaking – and for Pete’s sake could SOMEone please clean the windown – but no dice.

When I got home I stitched the most interesting parts together, sped up roughly double their original speed, and added a piece of music which, coincidentally, I had also dreamed up and “composed” on my Playstation Portable during the same flight (I told you I was bored).  [See my previous post for more about music on the PSP]   Actually, I redid the music on the Yamaha after I got home because the sound that is used for melody (it’s supposed to represent a saxophone) gets pretty grating after awhile on the original version.  So we end up with something like a mariachi band bumping into Yanni in an elevator and collaborating on location-appropriate music, but I kind of like how it fits with the images.  I hope you enjoy it.

Oh, and if you’re really bored, you can compare with the PSP-generated version:

CloudscapePSP

In spite of the lengthy list of online royalty-free music sources I listed in my previous post, finding the right tune for your images can be a challenging and time-consuming process.  So I’ve recently acquired some new gadgets to help make music for my videos myself – one conventional, and another quite unexpected.  Not that I expect Spielberg to give me a ring anytime soon, but…

The first “gadget” (OK, it’s a two-man lift) is the Yamaha DGX-630 “Portable Grand”, which is a piano, multitrack recorder, keyboard, synthesizer, and music teacher all in one.  If you know just a little bit about playing a keyed instrument and have a feel for music, you can use the multitrack recorder and all of the built-in harmony features and sounds to put together something relatively complex and decent-sounding.  If you’re looking to capture a certain “feeling” for your video, you can play around with the sounds and rhythms until you come up with something that works.  This thing is so “smart” it can even figure out which chord to play with the left hand based on what you’re playing with your right.  So I took it for a spin this weekend and this is what I came up with as a first attempt:

Soundtrack final

If you can come up with something slightly more original to call it, I’m all ears!  [And if you like it and want to borrow it, feel free.  I'll call it "Creative Commons - Attribution" but I'm really just curious what it would work well with, whether I get attribution or not.

The second gadget for making music I stumbled across is a little thing I call Playstation Portable.  Specifically, a "game" I picked up 50% off (ten bucks) called "Beaterator."  Yes, it actually works.  Especially when you compare it to an $80 program (to be unnamed here) I bought to do the same thing (which it doesn't).  You can use the thing to play "live" music composed of pre-loade, samples and sounds - or you can program it using individual sounds on 8 different tracks, record or upload your own sounds, edit individual sounds, and export to wav files or upload them to their sharing site.  Just playing around with the thing on a plane, here is what I came up with:

Flying To Kandahar (only so named because that's what I was doing at the time)

Desert Attack (because that's what I think it sounds like!)

So there you have it.  Now if someone could just get me an iPhone so I can use all the different music apps they offer, well maybe I could start a band like these guys.