Planet X Video Shoot - Day 1

Yes, dear Planet X'er - you read that correctly.

Planet X shot a video - albiet a home video. The deal was this ... via 98 Rock we found out about a home video contest where the winner would receive $1000. They then would go on to the regional finals which were to be held in San Diego and the winner of that contest would receive $10,000 and win a chance to appear on eMpTyV - and their TRL Big Deal

Even though I don't think music is or really should be a contest - we've been rather lucky so far which these types of events, so we figured we'd roll the bones, one more time.

Now we already had some video tape that our roadies Ed, Rob and Chuck have shot, we even have a professional three camera shoot from when we played Mr Lucky's in Chico last month. But the sound quality on most of those videos was really subpar, with the exception of this one tape of us at the Fox and Goose that sounds good, but you can't see anything and there was literally no room to move and perform a real show there.

So our first priority was to get good sound. Rob happens to have a minidisc recording rack that he's been using to record audio for many of our shows, so we devised a scheme to use Ron's mics and his recording recording gear to improve the sound quality greatly over what the tiny microphones that a hand-cam has and feed the combined video and sound live on to a stereo VCR.

We shot the video in our rented reheasal space, which we share with a sound and lighting company and since they are a lighting company for live performances - they have lots and lots of lights.

I think we used all of them.

At the same time.

Swirly lights - blinky lights - strobes. It was very "acid trip", but - at the time at least - we thought it looked cool.

Supposedly the contest was only going to accept 2 minutes of video, so we had to pick and choose which portions of which songs we wanted to include. Largely because they have the most modern sound, but also because there our newest and we think strongest material - we decided to tape "Harden", "Not Like U" (which is partially in 15/8 time signiture - and usually gets people going "What are they Doing? - Where's the down beat?") and our very newest "Wannabe?" (which to me, has a strong Creed vibe to it).

We shot video for about 5 hours, trying to make every take, THE take.

Oh yes, there were many, many outtakes of great comedic value. (But don't even ask about them because they've been locked away in a vault in an undisclosed location, carried there by a special bonded courier - sworn to secrecy. We could show them to you, but we'd have to kill you afterwards in order to preserve security and you don't want us to have to do that now do you?)

After we had at least two or three good takes of each song - we called it quits simply due to exhaustion. We left all our gear setup - went home and slept the sleep of the dead.

Little did we know what a wake up we'd get.

Continued...

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