My new year’s eve & my attempt at stop motion!

Hey everyone, happy new year! Hope you all had a good one! Myself? The last few years I’ve gone out to celebrate, but I felt like staying at home and being creative this year. So I stayed in, cooked myself a delicious pasta dish, baked some vegan cupcakes (which for my first attempt at vegan cake turned out OK!) and cut my hair (yes, I cut my own hair )

I also worked on the music video for a Feist cover I recorded ages ago. I love Feist’s music and ‘The Park’ is one of my favourites from her ‘The Reminder’ album (on a side note, I got her new album ‘Metals’ for Christmas and it’s bloody amazing!) I’ve always loved stop motion animation, and when it came to coming up with an idea for the music video, I thought why not give it a go?

It took me a month or so to find the right props for the video – I bought the two Lego figures from ebay, and bought the rest from a website that sold kits for doll house enthusiasts (this particular kit being a garden for a doll’s house.) The ‘snow’ you see in the video is actually flour!

I spent a day and a few evenings taking all the pictures,  and then did all the editing in two evenings. I learned a lot from doing it – primarily how important camera shake and lighting is. It was hard because I couldn’t really use any artificial lighting as it caused glare in the window I was using as my backdrop. I thought using the window for the sky in the background was quite a cool idea, and think it looks pretty good. Of course during the night time shots you can see my reflection as some points, and some of my room reflecting in the window too, but I think it adds to the video in a quirky way. I don’t have a decent tripod at all, just a cheap little one, so I had that fixed to a mic stand whilst I sat on my bed (my bed is right next to the window) and took the pictures. This meant it was extremely hard to keep the camera still – the fact that I had no remote either didn’t help – I had to push the button on the face of the camera to take a picture, and doing so always momentarily pushed the camera forward a fraction. In editing I used some image stabilisation, and that helped, but it’s still not great. The lack of decent lighting meant that a lot of the images are slightly out of focus or dimly lit, or just plain fuzzy looking.

Still, considering it was a first attempt I think it’s OK – it’s a bit of fun anyway. I hope you all get a few laughs from it, and enjoy the song! If the song is popular enough I might release it (I would just put it up on here for download, but for covers you have to pay for a license, which means I have to think about whether I can cover the cost or not.)

Escapades in Sheffield
If you’re still reading this, I have a little story to share! I did a gig in Sheffield two days after Christmas, and it ended up being one of the most stressful days I’ve had recently! The problems started not in Sheffield, but at home in Chilwell. In the morning I turned on my internet PC, only to be greeted by a blue screen. One of the main system files of windows XP had corrupted and so it would not boot. A system repair didn’t work so I had to re-install, wiping my C: drive. The problem here was that all my emails from Outlook express were installed there. I managed to use my Acronis recovery software to backup my emails before wiping the C: drive though, so I thought I was OK. I thought wrong. Once Windows was re-installed, trying to access my emails would not work.

I had booked my train tickets to Sheffield online and I had an email saved that had my booking reference, which I needed to collect my tickets from the station. So now I was kinda screwed as my emails were gone. Suddenly I remembered that my account on crosscountrytrains.com should have my booking saved on it. I log on and nothing is there. Frustrated, and with only 30 mins at this point before I had to catch my train, I rang them up. The line operator tells me they have nothing booked except for my tickets to Leicester for my gig there in January. I try to explain that I’d paid for tickets but it was getting me nowhere and I had to leave fast.

At this point my mum and her partner had come home, so I managed to get a lift down to the station from my mum’s partner. I figured I could maybe try and sort something out at the ticket office. Of course when we got there I realised the ticket office was closed as it was the evening. At this point I had limited options. Checking the ticket machine confirmed that I 100% needed that booking reference. So now I was pretty much ready to give up and go home, cancelling the gig. THANKFULLY, my mum’s partner offers to buy me new tickets. This was incredibly kind of him, and although I’m rubbish at accepting stuff from other people, I gladly accepted. So thanks to him the gig went ahead, and despite being fairly quiet (two days after Christmas, I knew it would be) it was still a good gig, and I really liked the venue. I had a nice chat with the sound guy and he said I should definitely come back sometime and do an opening slot for a Sheffield-based artist, which was cool.

So yeah, that was my not-very-interesting story Sorry if it was a little long winded! Just thought I’d share it – this blog offers me a chance to share the kind of random musings I would normally keep to myself! I guess the lesson learned from my tale is to write down those booking reference numbers! You should never rely on computers to store data as it can always let you down when you least expect it!

All the best, Marc.