Eclectic Trains

I am very proud of this music video we made at Xube. It is the product of 2 months on-and-off filming with the new Panasonic AG-AF101 (AG-AF100 in some regions). You can find out more about it here.

A fun photomotion film made with my partner at Xube.

Hope Augustus live at PJ's, Covent Garden from eclectictrains on Vimeo.

In June this year I had the opportunity to film jazz singer Hope Augustus at PJ's in Covent Garden.  It was great to get out with a video camera and capture a flavour of the atmosphere at Hope's gig.  The performing space at PJ's is intimate, for those of you that don't know it, and therefore a challenge to film in.  So I plonked myself at the back of an eating area and didn't take the camera off the tripod until the punters had had a few drinks.

It was a fun night.  There were certain moments when the audience were completely captivated which is hard to achieve when everyone is eating and imbibing.  Look out for the audience reaction to Hope singing "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face".  Before the show I filmed a short interview with Hope.  This was a family show, so to speak, as Hope is my sister-in-law.  I hope (every pun intended) you enjoy this short film of the night.

[For those of you interested in the technical stuff: the film was shot on a Sony Z1 (HDV mode);  I recorded extra sound from the PA feed into a Zoom H4n (utterly crucial); I edited on Final Cut Pro and my colleagues at Xube graded my footage using Magic Bullets].

I'm not sure I can't answer that question yet because we have only just started experimenting with DSLR camera technology but we had great fun making this little film at Xube last week.  Filmed on a cold winter's day in Wanstead Park, East London.  Here is The Chocolate Lab Test:


The Chocolate Lab Test from xubetv on Vimeo.

In September 2008 I wrote a blog about my frustrations with Wordpress (PHP, CSS and the rest) and I gave up! Yep, I thought Blogger would do for now. Wordpress (the open source Wordpress.org variety) was just too damn fiddly. If you want to blog why not get something that works straight out of the box like Blogger. I didn't see the point of Wordpress.com (the hosted service that Blogger is similar to) it was either Blogger the ready-made package or host-it-yourself Wordpress "purity". A rather silly dichotomy that resulted in dumping the pure option rather quickly. Well, something changed and I have had a more successful second go at Wordpress.  Hurrah!

Over the last 2 years I have seen, read and explored many highly-customised, slick and SEO-friendly Wordpress blogs and thought that my company needed to head in that direction. Our new website is still in its infancy but it has been launched.  Please go and take a look: Xube - High Quality Video Production.  It's a first attempt, admittedly, but I'm pleased with how it shows off some of our most recent work and has blogging as a core feature of the site.

It's very early days with the new website but our plans are to use the blog to deepen and enrich the content published there.  If you have a basic knowledge of HTML and are willing to learn a few CSS tricks then Wordpress is worth exploring.  It has now matured into an CMS (Content Management System) which means you publish what you like, when you like and Wordpress will handle the rest (such as archiving).  It has taken the best part of 2 months to get the features working the way I want them too and there will inevitably more changes over the next 2 months.

Any tips?  I have found the Thesis theme a good investment.  The SEO-friendly theme holds your hand around Wordpress and makes customisation slightly less daunting.  This is a paid-for theme but you don't have to go down that route.  You could try free themes, make your own or just adapt what Wordpress gives you.

I am now inspired to learn a little more about PHP, the coding language behind Wordpress, but am going to take one step at a time.