BLOG from Psychodots Drummer
This has been quite a week.
The psychodots went to Chicago to work at Flashpoint Academy - a digital media school that does recording, film, and game design. We arrived Monday around lunchtime and proceeded to bring gear into the school's recording studio to re-record a tune off Terminal Boulevard (Not a Pretty Face) at their very nicely tricked out studio - we set up and got sounds Monday and tracked Tuesday all day. The engineering instructors were terrific, and we did some question and answer stuff with the students, who also got to take turns manning the board and tracking vocals. We had rough mixes by the end of the day
Wednesday we went over to their video production facility to shoot a video for the tune. I thought the students were going to be doing that, but it turns out the film professor was directing and he had a full pro crew doing cameras, makeup, wardrobe, sets - there were about 25 people working on it, and the students were mainly observng, but some were helping with the sets and doing gopher stuff. We did several takes of us just performing the tune, then a bunch of vignettes that were supposed to portray the band stuggling to kep up with pop trends over the years, so they had us first as hippies, then punks, ten hair metal, then grunge - with full hair and makeup for every period. Their were also some pro actors - a hilarious named Levi portraying our sleazball manager, and some super hot young ladies who assisting us in making transtions from one style to the next.
The director was terrific, as was the entire crew. The final video is going to have a lot of art and animation added, so it will be in post production for a while. I've done videos before and didn't enjoy it much, but this was an absolutely incredible experience. I'm sure it will appear on youtube at some point, so I'll link it up when that happens. In the meantime - if you cruise around the flashpoint website, you can see what the school is all about - there's a picture of the video shoot on the front page and a little blurb about the recording in the blogs. www.tfa.edu/blog
Then to cap it all off, we played a smokin' gig in Dayton last night.