Planet X Video Shoot - Day 2

Well, after reviewing the results from the first day of shooting - we basically thought they'd we'd gone waaaaay overboard on the lighting. I mean, we didn't want to get sued for triggering somebodies elypeptic seazure - how's that gonna look in the bio?

Nope: that wouldn't be good. So welcome to Video Shoot DAY 2.

Fortunately this was on a Friday night and on a week where we didn't have any gigs scheduled, and none of us had school or work the next day.

No pressure, right?

Yeah, right.

To start things off, I got there late because of a huge pile of dookey that they made me swim through to get my paycheck. As soon as I arrived, Ron had to leave to go to American River College to receive an award for "Outstanding Instrumentalist".

We had hoped that we could get my step-son Nathan to handle the lighting as he's been trained in theater lighting and has done the lighting for several shows at ARC, which is the same school that Ron attends. But for various reasons - Nate and Ron didn't hook up.

At any rate Nate had given us some suggestions to cut down on the visual overload and we followed them, eliminating the strobe lights and cutting down on some of ambient and swirling light effects.

After a couple hours Ron got back, but Rob - who was handling the video and sound had to split. He was using his girlfriends VCR and he'd left the remote control at her place. Unfortunately and for some unexplained reason - you can't do any *recording* on her VCR without the remote control - so he decided to run over to Walmart and simply buy a replace (which he could return later) and use the remote control from the replacement so we could record.

So we wait...

Rob got back, opened the box with the VCR in it, and it was the wrong brand. Oh sure, it said "SONY" on the outside, but it was a "Magnavox" on the inside. Plus we couldn't simply use this new VCR in stead of his girlfriends because we needed one that was stereo and the one he bought...wasn't.

I'm not sure I even recognized all the curse words he used.

Ok, so he goes back to Walmart again...

And we wait so more...

He finally came back with a fully operating stereo VCR at about 11pm.

OK, now we could *start* filming.

And we did - running through the same three songs a few times, although I think our energy level wasn't as high as the shoot before - putting your all instrumentally and physically into every take only to have somebody miss a que and bring the entire song to a halt is *real* draining. So we we're willing to just try and get sections of the songs on tape rather than try and get one completely perfect take of each song since we knew we were going to have to cut things down to just snippets of 20-40 seconds anyway.

Ultimately though, this video looked better than the first one did.

MIssion Accomplished.

Or so we thought...

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