Here Comes Hurricane

Hurricane came over to my house dressed in a suit, wearing pink flip flops. Unfortunately, the shots that showed the flip flops didn't make it into the final cut. Here are the animations we made of HLW:



Again, the shots are sideways, since they were shot to be printed onto paper and iron-ons. Also, the size got cropped when I ran these tests, so you don't get to see HLW's glasses, which is a real shame.

o3rd Time's a Charm

Now we had figured out the general pace, so it was time to start filming the rest of the band. I started with o3. I went to his house, and he set up his drums in front of his garage, in his driveway. Some of his neighbors honked while we took the pictures.



The video is sideways because it was shot with the intention of being printed on posters. Notice how the bass drum comes out on every hit? That detail is hard to see in the final cut of the video.

A Second Test

Encouraged by the first test, I brought the camera to co-Director Steve Willis' house.  We popped open a few Carte Blancs and shot some more test footage:



You'll notice looping of the same scenes but at different speeds.  This helped us see our options regarding pacing. In the end, we opted for the faster pacing (meaning 5 times more photos to take!).

In seeing this again, I realize that I'd I forgot how captivating the banana footage was.  We'll have to explore the banana theme more in another video.

Step One - Boots Before Feet

Here's the first stop motion movie we made for the project:



I shot this in an afternoon. It helped me first start to figure out how this was going to work. This is when the math started.  Don't worry. I won't bore you with the math.  The trick was syncing the tempo (in BPMs) with the frames per second. The hard math would come later.

The Never-Ending Video Shoot

My friend Hip Williams recently noticed that every time I tell some one how long the Sydney Stone video took to make, I add a month.  As usual, he's right.  In truth it all depends on what you call the start.  Is it the stick figure drawings in a notebook in March?  The first photo shoot of o3 playing drums on his driveway in May?  Or September when we first duck-taped the halogen work lights to PA in the spare bedroom of co-director Steve Willis' basement? 

Enough friends have emailed me asking about how we filmed it, I thought it might be fun to show a few photos and early tests and to warn the weak-hearted against the lure of stop-motion production.

For those of you just tuning in. Here's the finished video:

Throwing Light on a Stone

Years ago, a friend and I were writing songs together. He clipped an article from the New York Times entitled "A Web of Money Drugs and Death" and gave it to me. He thought it would make a good song. I started to read it, but it was too awful to finish. I put it in a fat folder and didn’t look at it for nearly ten years.

A little over two years ago I left Austin to spend a month in Oregon, living on a Christmas tree farm and writing songs for Kissinger. I brought that fat folder with me, and after sifting through it one morning, rediscovered the article. The serene landscape of the tree farm was soothing enough to let me finish reading the cold, seemingly preposterous story. I grieved for the stories' many victims and channeled my detached, belated anger into the lyrics for the song.

A Friend of Mine Named Steve Goodman

There’s a verse in David Allen Coe’s famous “You Never Even Called By My Name” that begins “a good friend of mine by the name of Steve Goodman wrote this song, and he told me he had written the perfect country and western song.” I think of that line every time I think of his namesake, and my friend, Steve Goodman.

I met Steve when I was touring with a pre-Kissinger band. We hit it off right away, mostly because we shared drinking philosophies. These habits were, admittedly, fanatical. One of my early memories of our friendship involves me leaning backward in a chair with my mouth agape while he directs two strangers to pour jack and coke from large bottles into my mouth simultaneously. Thankfully, I don’t find myself in situations like that any more.

When the buzzes wore off, we still had plenty to talk about, and that’s how the friendship continued. We both liked making things, and often combined our two passions (alcohol and writing). Perhaps our greatest collective moments of genius slipped away from us on account of the whirling forces of gravity, or the late night whiskey runs to Kentucky, but we did manage to finish one song. It recounts a seeming epic journey we took to a suburban Ohio mall. We encountered a Dazed and Confused-worthy burner in a rest-room, and a vacant, teen-aged food-court vendor within minutes of each other. Those meetings inspired the song Urbia, which Kissinger recorded on our first CD Charm.

Steve also clipped and handed me a news article over ten years ago. The grim story inspired the title track of our most recent release “The Sydney Stone 3P".

For the last several years, I’ve usually referred to Mr. Goodman by his Kissinger name… Agent Snead. I saw him a few times in Texas and Ohio once Kissinger began touring. He joined the military and was studying medicine last I heard. Since then, I’ve lost track of him. I’m hopeful that by listing his real name, he may stumble across this blog and get in touch with me. We have some catching up to do.