Hello all, I hope you’re all feeling festive. We’re still finishing the video for Fear Of Flying but what we’ve done so far looks great.

We’re all going out for a Christmas curry tonight (although I’m still feeling slightly liverish after last night’s excessive Christmas drinking)

I hope you’ve all done some Christmas shopping,

Lots of love

jez

Hello everyone out there, I just thought I’d keep you up to date with the filming of our video for Fear Of Flying. I don’t think we realized how much work would be involved in trying to make a stop-frame animation video (the same effect was used in Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video made by Nick Park of Wallace and Gromit fame!)on a limited budget. My admiration has increased for anyone who works in this world. The amount of patience you need is extraordinary. It’s all worth it when you see the hours of hard work you’ve put in turned into a few precious seconds of footage. For those of you who don’t know the method, I’ll explain it briefly. The first stage is filming the person in the scene (imagine I’m singing a chorus of the song to camera, about 30 seconds of footage). The video footage is put on a laptop so I can see what I’m doing in each frame (25 frames a second). I advance frame by frame through the scene and a digital photograph is taken of me replicating of each frame (with me so far?). When I’ve copied what I was doing I was doing on the video, the digital photographs are put on the computer (25 x 30 seconds = 750 photographs) where they are turned back into video. This method means that you can make all kinds of magic effects happen between frames.

We’ve nearly got all the footage into the computer now and our hard working editor Graham Affer is putting them in order.

Watch this space for the finished work of genius……

Jez x