The month of august have been especially chaotic and challenging for me with interpersonal and emotional troubles piling up. It feels like one of those moments in life when a bunch of shitting things happen at the same time and you have to focus your energy on solving them and getting through while hoping thing get better on the other end.
I’ve also been having a lot less tattoo clients this summer and practically no client work for illustration or logo work, which makes some things harder but also freed some mental space and time to figure out the hard stuff.
Beast of the Black Hill music video
After spending 5 nights in the woods shooting the music video in July, me and Hex at down at the editing table to put the whole thing together in August. Once again, like we did for the Kill the Pain music video, the storyboard and animatic were super helpful as a base to put down the structure and the main shots of the edit. And this time I went even further and planned some transitions using matching camera movements in the storyboard and the shotlist so when we would get to the editing we would have shots that match for the key transitions. Some of those ended up working and some didn’t but it was fun to try it out and it allowed me to see what was missing in the planning stage to really nail those.
The place where I think I’ve progressed the most is the color grading. In preparation for color grading this music video I went down a deep dive in getting to know Davinci Resolve better and understanding better how to work with raw log footage, color spaces and all that and I think it really paid off. I was able to get much more saturated and moody looks and also figured out how to use gradient masks to apply a color shift on just parts of the image, like the still above where the red tint accentuates the red lights that we put in the background.
I also got to do some composition for the first time, combining the two harbinger characters. For this we did a test prior to going out and shooting the actual music video to see if we could do it in a way that’s convincing, which allowed us to learn about the best way to light a scene like that to hide the seam in the middle.
And lastly I played quite a bit with the infrared trailcam footage in order to find a treatment that would retain it’s eerie quality but still blend well with the footage from the other camera. I ended up using two gradient adjustments, one darker at the top and and one lighter at the bottom and some tilt-shift blur that brings the focus in the middle of the shot and create an even more surreal feel.
Diablo tribute tape
This project that started almost as a joke on Mastodon with some friends became a whole thing pretty quickly, with 10 musicians pitching in one or more Diablo inspired song to create a whole compilation. I used the opportunity to craft a really intricate j-card for the cassette release with a full scene of Tristram on the inside and plenty of small illustration referencing the original game all around. These are currently in production and I’ll update all of you when they’re up for grabs :)
Reading:
- Warlike, Howling, Pure by Aerïon
Listening to:
- Revanchist by Evian Christ
- Harlecore by Danny L. Harle
- Time is but the Drawing of a Sword by Lyndsie Alguire
- Positive Delusion by Clouds
Watching:
- The Boy and the Heron (2023)
- Alien: Romulus (2024)