Vakkotaur

While Saturday was a typical Saturday for me, Sunday was not a typical Sunday. There were a couple things at home that jmaynard could use and I drove up to Minneapolis to give those items to him and to see a bit of a video shoot. The drive up was uneventful enough, even with the studio being in or near downtown Minneapolis. I got to the studio a bit before 9 AM when things were supposed to start. The place is one part of an old warehouse building converted into a strange mix of photography and video studios and industrial business. Upon entering the building one is greeted with the curious juxtaposition of a big layer cake prop sitting next to a diesel engine.

I won't say what the video is about or for or who else was there, but it was interesting to see the process or at least part of it. It will also be quite interesting to see, and hear, the eventual result and compare it with I saw. Jay and I were both disappointed to find out one person would only be there Tuesday while we could only be there Sunday. That person is someone Jay and I both would have liked to have met.

The process from a bystander's point of view is a lot of waiting mixed with a lot of doing things over and over, with variations. Not so much re-takes as gathering a vast amount of material to choose from in the later editing.

The studio itself was a plain white in front of the camera and where the far wall met the floor was not sharp 90 degree join, at least as it appears, but a gentle curve. The result is that a person standing alone as seen by the camera is like an image on a sheet of otherwise blank paper, appearing alone in a big blank definitionless space. That's the appearance. The "vast space" is really quite small.

The video and audio were being done separately so it was a curious mix to watch the video part. The music would play and people in front of the camera would sing along, but there were occasionally spoken (or shouted to get heard through the music) suggestions or commands from behind the camera. It was the sort of thing you might have read about being done in the silent film era, only in this case sound will be added in later.

Things took longer than expected, which is normal. A Production Assistant told me that a shoot will always run long, even if you allow for it running long and pad it. Also, something will have to go wrong. In this case, the something going wrong was a miscommunication that wasn't anyone's fault, but resulted in folks thinking Jay could be there well into the evening and not discovering otherwise until well into the afternoon. This resulted in the Production Assistant me driving over to the hotel so she could pack stuff Jay's stuff into a suitcase and I could drive his car back to the studio. This also went wrong in its own way as some items didn't make it into the suitcase. The was taken care, and all was eventually well.

I left as folks were headed to where some sound recording would be done. I goofed and found myself in a parking lot that had been euphemistically labeled as being Washington Avenue. And I had thought that the navigation around the hotel was annoying. After extracting myself from that mess I got to I-394 and headed back to civilization.