Hello everyone, I decided to try something different this month. I realized that I quite enjoyed these little retrospective I was doing by going over what I’ve drawn in the last month and wondered if I could use the opportunity and context of these posts to try to start a kind of journal of my work and experiences and not just talk about the drawings that came out of it.
September was crazy. I feel like I end up saying that to myself at the end of every month and maybe I’m starting to reckon with the fact that an artist’s life often end up looking like that, with a bunch of projects going on at the same time and tight deadlines and rushes to get everything ready for a release or an event. Or maybe it’s my ADHD brain that so often can’t bring itself to start working on something for the longest time that adds a lot of urgency to the whole process. I still have to find the right balance between too much work but a lot of excitement and too little and a lack of motivation but I trust that I’ll find it as I keep experimenting.
Voidxwitch music video
This last month’s big focus has been the VOIDXWITCH release, the album itself, the music video that we filmed and edited for Kill the Pain and all the promotion work we did to try and get their music out there. We had pretty high goals and standards set for it, higher than I’ve ever set to myself and we are aiming to do stuff professionally because we feel that the music needs it, Hex’s vision and concepts are so rich and deep that they need a rich and layered visual world to be the complete work of art that they could be. That meant that the whole thing was a challenge and we had to learn so much new things. I did a couple short videos before, and a music video or two in there but it was the first time shooting one with multiple locations, complex lighting setups, and practical special effects (can’t wait to show you how the blood cannon we made worked out ;) ). One of the first things we did this month of September was finishing the edit of the music video, following the initial plan we had laid out in the storyboard. I’m including a side-by-side of a couple of shots from storyboard to final edit in here to show how it ended up looking.
The editing phase was more straightforward than in previous projects we worked on, partially because we had planned a lot before shooting and already had a skeleton of the structure of the music video but also because I’m starting to be more comfortable editing, grading and adding effects in resolve. I learned about fusion and more advanced compositing technique during that month while applying that knowledge directly, which is always the best way for me to learn new stuff.
From there we moved on to color grading and giving the video it’s final look. This is one of my favorite parts, especially after watching the video over and over with a really flat look and desaturated colors, it’s really satisfying to see it with it’s full contrast and impact. I did a couple of different grades for it, one for the spaghetti inspired scenes for which I studied the colors of actual western movies, a rave-like super saturated and trippy one for the scenes in the warehouse and an intense blood-red one for the scenes with the fake blood.
hen after hours of rendering and some trial and error to find the best codec and bitrate for it to look good on youtube and other platforms, the music video was done and ready for it’s release on Oct. 13.
Voidxwtch album and promotion
During that time, we received the mastered tracks for the album and went ahead with setting up everything for distribution. This is such an obscure part of music that I feel rarely gets talked about. We wanted the album to be available everywhere but decided on bandcamp to be the main place where the album is hosted and sold including it’s physical copy and accompanying merch. Bandcamp has a pretty straightforward process for that which is much appreciated, from there, we’ve put the songs on Soundcloud and used a third party distributor (cd baby) to get it to the myriad of streaming platforms. This ended up opening so many rabbit holes of legal documents to fill and musicians associations to join in order to collect royalties. Once again we had to learn and research a bunch to make sure we got everything right.
At that point we left Montreal for a week to go on a little retreat in Hex’s hometown in northern Ontario to finish up all the promotional material for the release and start planning the details of the release party. Being away and no working my regular day job really allowed me to give full attention to what was left to do and have more creative bandwidth with it. It was also really pleasant to see the colors in the trees and fall was slowly settling in.
Just before leaving I designed and got printed this wanted poster as a promotion/world-building item for the music video and we ended up taking photos of it on a telephone pole near a cemetery, to really nail the aesthetic. I normally hate doing “marketing” or promoting something the way people do under capitalism, but when i get the chance to just have fun with a project and use the opportunity to create things that make me excited I feel like I’m doing something right and hopefully it can resonate with other people.
I’ll go into more details and share more pictures of this poster soon on here, but in the meantime here’s some more promotional stuff we did for the album, video and release party.
This is getting longer than I expected it to be so I’ll keep it at that for now and make another post with my drawings of September. To close it off, I’ve been wanting to share some of my recent readings and the music I’ve been listening to and getting inspired by lately. Here’s my selection for September.
Reading:
- Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta
- The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Listening to:
- Illfänas by Them Teeth
- Bring Wet Cunt / Hammerhead single by Zheani
- Never Pure by SUFFER RING