Jonny Diina: Outside

My good friend and amazing musician Jonny Diina came home to Buffalo, and he asked if we could shoot a video of him playing some of his tunes on his mom’s Steinway baby grand. We had two shiny new Canon XH-A1 HD video cameras, a Mackie 1202 mixer, Audio-Technica AT2020 condenser mic for vocals, and a pair of condenser mics I borrowed from an audio friend in X-Y configuration over the piano soundboard.

One camera was on tripod, with my cameraman zooming in and out a wee bit too much (forgivable, he was new!) and the other camera was hand-held. I didn’t have time to build a steadycam gizmo, but it still came out ok.

The major technical snafu of the day was this: we had the audio configured to be a mixdown of the piano XY in one channel, and vocals to the other channel going into the main camera. This would have given me the flexibility to balance and eq the mix in post, and given that the target was YouTube, stereo piano from the XY pair wasn’t a priority. Somehow, the camera got set to record only one of the two audio tracks! I don’t know how, but at the time the cameras were new toys and this is one of the first shoots we did, so it got screwed up. Luckily the sound was usable, if not stellar as intended. Shit happens!

 

CyberJocks Adult Swim Commercial

We threw this together a long time ago for local advertising on Adult Swim. It’s ok, not our best stuff, but we were pinched for time. This was well before we got our video cameras, so all we had to work with were a ton of stills and some game footage. I hate the way cyberjocks.com appears over the video. I love the motion titles at the end. And of course, we had to throw in Leroy Jenkins 😉

 

CJTV Outro

[flashvideo file=https://aaronkondziela.com/video/cjtvout.flv image=https://aaronkondziela.com/video/cjtvout.jpg /]

Here we have a quick motion graphics outro made for CyberJocks TV.

 

Shark HD Background

[flashvideo file=https://aaronkondziela.com/video/shark.flv image=https://aaronkondziela.com/video/shark.jpg /]

I created this HD background loop for use behind some chroma-key video for CyberJocks TV. Our sponsor was Shark Energy Drink, so I put in their logo and a subtle shadow of it that moves with the light streaming through the surface of the water. This added a dynamic feel to the clip, without being too distracting like so many backgrounds you can find in clip libraries.