Music Videos

Stacey Zegers: Sunflower
A simple video with a strong message was the very first Music video that I shot in 2011. The entire process was a three day journey from concept to final product, and was picked up by Kid’s Help Phone. (read blog post here) News coverage here & here.

The Rescue: Televised

Shot at the UnLondon UnLab on a Sunday in March. (read blog post here)

Boss Rebel: Name in Lights
Shot in 2010 but compiled in 2011, this video was the one project that sat on my to-do list the longest. (blog post here)

Stacey Zegers: Rules
Shot at Cowboy’s Ranch in London in March.

Shelly Rastin: High Class Trailer Trash
Shooting this gave me the chance to shoot with Canadian music legend, Randy Bachman.

Burn Like Fabulous: Kettering
My first video that I actually stepped in front of the camera. The song was a project for my short film, Imprint.

Clayton Healey: Find Another Way
Music Video was completed in 2011, Artist is releasing Jan 2012.

Film:

Imprint
My first short film as a writer/director. Winner of the Best Cinematics award for the 2011 London Short Film Showcase (Blog post about the creation of Imprint here)

Frantic
Winner of the London Fringe 2011 62 Hour Film contest.

Promotional Video:

Stacey Zegers: Kid’s Help Phone PSA
Shot for the Kid’s Help Phone celebrity ambassador program

SmithsonMartin Emulator
Promotional video for the SmithsonMartin Emulator DJ product.

Emulator Festival
Video for the SmithsonMartin Emulator festival

Community

Shot on Mobile Film Showcase


2011 marked the creation of the Shot on Mobile Showcase. A film showcase designed where all films entered are shot on mobile devices. I was proud to spearhead this project.

Music

Imprint: Soundtrack
My first journey into music since 2006. The soundtrack was created with friends Mike Scott & Pat Dryburgh. The soundtrack also featured a cover from my new band, Burn Like Fabulous. Download the soundtrack for free here.

Web/Podcast

The Geek Runner.com
A site created with my friends, Bill Deys, Will Spaetzel & Rob Raymond
. Created with reviews for techie runners in mind, with accompanying podcast

My Top Music Picks for 2011: (in no particular order)

The Antlers: Burst Apart
Highlights: Corsicana, Tiptoe, Hounds

M83: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
Highlights: Midnight City, New Map, Splendor, The Bright Flash

The Naked and Famous: Passive Me, Aggressive You
Highlights: Young Blood, No Way, The Sun, Girls Like You.

Cliff Martinez & Various Artists: Drive
A masterpiece from beginning to end, the best soundtrack to come out this year.

Tycho: Dive
Highlights:  Adrift, Coastal Brake, Daydream

Lights: Siberia
Highlights:  Flux and Flow, Banner, Suspension

Porter Robinson: Spitfire
Highlights: Spitfire, The Seconds, Vandalism

Foo Fighters: Wasting Light
Highlights:  Rope, These Days, Dear Rosemary

Coldplay: Mylo Xyloto
Highlights:  Paradise, Major Minus, Princess of China

We filmed on a Saturday afternoon in a warehouse with around 50 extras and enough confetti that I’m sure is still stuck in most of our lungs from that day.

Photo by Kevin Van Lierop

In the end we did 16 takes, with take number 13 being the magic number.

Photo by Kevin Van Lierop

Photo by Kevin Van Lierop

Getting the vari-speed vision in my head to work was another beast all together.

To get the frame ramping to work, it was a process of taking the lyrics of the song, matching where each word happened in time on the video as well as where it happens in the song and then telling the editing software to move video frame “A” to match song frame “A”. A lengthy process.

Here is how the video looked, straight off the camera:

There is no lighting and the song is sped up and slowed down during certain parts. This was done so the chorus would always feel slower and the verse by Dreddy would be quicker to match the rapid fire pace of they lyrics.

Once the keyframeing was done, I ran into my first hurdle of the process… rendering. The first render passes that I did on the video would take almost 8 hours to complete. Trying to keep productivity up, it was tough because It would take 8 hours to see if there were any frame issues, and there were plenty. I could only do one fix a day, because every time something need to be fixed, I would have to render the entire thing. Looking back at the process, I did all of the key framing and time mapping in Final Cut Pro… my first mistake.

Final cut pro is an editing package, not a visual effects platform. This is where I made my second mistake… After reading on support boards for the time ramping plugin that Adobe Premiere was the best solution, I re-entered the keyframeing data (1395) events into premiere. While the render time came down to 4 hours, the video would never export properly and produced a jello effect on the band. I thought that my solution would be to put everything on the highest quality and let the mac crunch the numbers. This resulted in a 36 hour render time. In the end I was left with a 20GB video file that looked horrible. This file still had none of the artificial lighting that I had included.

The artificial lighting was done in Adobe After Effects. Out of frustration I thought that I would try the time mapping plugin in After Effects and roll the dice to see if it produced better results. It did. After re entering all of the keyframe data (for the third time now) the vision that I was in my head became a reality. I simplified the artificial lighting because the motion tracking was all over the place. Another mistake, when shooting something with artificial elements, put some sort of marker on the wall so the you can track the camera motion.

In the end, I’m pleased with the results. Approaching a project that requires visual effects, I know that I’ll be more prepared next time.

I’d like to thank the guys from Boss Rebel for their patience with this project.

January started off with a couple of goals and aspirations. First off was my Photo365 Project. Unfortunately, I lasted only the month of January, and then got way too busy to dedicate my time to the project. Below is my favourite photo that I took.

February was the month that I was the busiest. On February 2nd, I filmed the music video for “Sunflower” by Stacey Zegers. The video was received very well and has gained over 10,000 combined views online.

The Anti-Bullying message was so well received that Stacey and I did numerous press interviews discussing the video and it’s message.

LFPress.com Interview

View Video Online

A-Channel Interview

View Video Online

London Free Press – Front Page Article

Ontario Morning interview with Wei Chen – CBC Radio
CBC Radio interview with Stacey Zegers & Edward Platero by redcatfilm

As a result of the video, Kid’s Help Phone invited Stacey to take part in their “Celebrity Ambassador” program. Below is a PSA that I shot for the Kid’s Help Phone website.

In February, I was fortunate to land on the front page of the London Free Press promoting the Shot on Mobile Film Showcase

I ended the month shooting the music video for the track “Televised” by The Rescue

In March, I participated in the Fringe 62-Hour Short film contest. I teamed up with Jason Clarke and Darryl Calcott from Sunny Day Jazz to create the film “Frantic”

Cast and Crew Credits

Director: Darryl Callcott

Written By: Jason Clarke and Darryl Callcott

Cast: Pat Dryburgh, Gerrick Winston, Andrew Jiggins, Kayla Rock, Tammy Chrest and Craig White.

Producer: Jason Clarke

Original Music: Darryl Callcott

Cinematographer: Edward Platero

Editor: Jason Clarke

Colour Grading and Special Effects: Edward Platero

We were fortunate to win this years contest.

2011 has already shaped up to be a great year, can’t wait to see whats ahead.

Top Albums of 2010 (in no particular order)

Raised by Swans – No Ghostless Place
Hightlights: We Were Never Young, Light at North’s End, Secret Garden, There’s hope yet.

Hot Chip – One Life Stand
Highlights: I feel Better, One Life stand, Hand me down your love, Thieves in the night.

LCD Soundsystem – This is Happening
Highlights: Dance Yrself Clean, You wanted a hit, Home, I Can Change

Caribou – Swim
Highlights: Kaili, Odessa, Sun, Leave House

Eminem – Recovery
Highlights: So Bad, W.T.P, Won’t Back Down, 25 to life

Boss Rebel – Heavybad (No, I’m not pandering here, it really has been great working with these guys to help promote such a great album)
Highlights: Name in Lights, Conversations, Barely a 5, Couldn’t Care less.

The XX
Highlights: Stars, Islands, Shelter, Crystalized

Tokyo Police Club – Champ
Highlights: Favourite Food, Frankenstein, Bambi, Gone

Duran Duran – All you need is Now
Highlights: The Man who Stole a Leopard, Girl Panic!, Blame the Machines, Being Followed

Motion Picture Soundtrack – Tron Legacy (Daft Punk) / The Social Network (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross) / Inception (Hans Zimmer)
Hard to choose here, all 3 scores were purely incredible, and played perfectly against the visual aspects of each movie.

Hot Chip’s set was evenly balanced covering the high point of the past 3 albums.

Hot Chip Set List: (highlights bolded)
And I Was A Boy From School
One Pure Thought
Thieves In The Night
One Life Stand
Over And Over
Hand Me Down Your Love
Shake a Fist
We Have Love
Hold On
I Feel Better
Ready For The Floor

Some video highlights taken from my iPhone of Hot Chip’s Set:

Going into the show I knew that Hot Chip would be a solid performance, but had doubts about LCD Soundsystem. I’ve been a casual listener of the band, and only own 1 of their albums, I was blown away by their live set, and stayed way longer than I intended.

LCD Soundsystems Set List:

Dance Yrself Clean
Drunk Girls
Get Innocuous
Daft Punk Is Playing At My House
I Can Change
All My Friends
You Wanted a Hit
Tribulations
Movement
Yeah
Throw
Encore:
Someone Great
Losing My Edge
Home
Encore 2:
New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

Wrapping up, in hindsight, this was one of the best concerts that I have ever attended. More pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eplatero/sets/72157625259084150/with/5123459025/

What we did was, using a logitech quickcam, we took a picture of the live performance every 15 seconds, then uploaded the pic to our webserver and ran a javascript to refresh the image every 25 seconds.  For the audio, I had to contact a company in California to let us use their RealMedia streaming server.  This fed the webpage with the audiofeed that the user first had to download real player.

Here is our original blog post about the event:

February 14th: Johnny’s Rocket Room. Our live show on this web site. This show had a couple of new events for the band. The first being the debut of the newest song to the reel live set, “I hold crush” and the second being reel’s first live show on the internet. We would like to thank the following people who helped make the show happen: Nick Linedecker at Kern Internet Services in Bakersfied, CA, Copyland Systems for supplying the hardware to make the show be broadcast. We would also like to thank the following people who helped to promote the show: Chris Gordon and Karen Murray from 103.1fm “The Hawk” for having us the program “London Live”. Janice Zolf at BBS Communications for the spot on Entertainment Desk on TV-London. And last we would like to thank all the people who came out to the show and tuned in on the internet.

The blog post on WayBack Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/19970422164648/www.execulink.com/~reel/reelnews.htm

Here is the CFPL news coverage:

Sometimes, it is nice to walk down memory lane….

Friday, January 15th, I had the great pleasure to attend the CD release of “no ghostless place” by Raised by Swans.  I have been a very big fan of the band since hearing “Violet Light” on the CBC Radio3 Podcast 4 years ago.  Their first CD “Codes & Secret Longing” has been a favourite of mine since the day it was purchased, and sits in my list of top albums of all time.

I have been eagerly awaiting to hear some new material, and after 4 years, the band has release their new CD. I ordered mine via online pre-order hoping to receive my copy the day before the show.  I can review this album with one word: AMAZING.  The new CD is on par if not better than Codes & Secret longing.  I cannot recommend enough to anybody reading this post, leave my site right now, and click on this link to buy this album right now!

I almost didn’t make the show as our babysitter fell through at the last minute, but my wife, Tracey decided to stay home with the kids so I wouldn’t miss the show.

Moving on now to my review of the show.  If it has not been made clear, I am a fan.  The band played a solid 14 song set, that featured heavily the new material of “No Ghostless Place”.   The new material played very well live, some songs like “Hail of Arrows” and “Secret Garden /S.C” sounding more rounded out and driven than the recorded versions.

Sound at Call the Office has always been a problem in my opinion, and there were times where the vocals did get lost in the wall of distorted mud that is Call the Office’s sound system.   According to interviews with the band, they are about to embark on a coast to coast tour of Canada, so it was nice to have them playing in front of a hometown audience before embarking cross country.

I managed to take quite a few pictures of the performance, you can view the entire set on my flickr page here.

Setlist from the show: (Show Highlights bolded)

We Were Never Young
Hail of Arrows
Relentless
Easier
Capable of Cruelty
Old Fires
Longer Shadows, Shorter Days
Sandcastles
The Waitings Over
Still Inside You
There’s Hope Yet
How do These Hearts Unfold
Violet Light

Band Website: www.raisedbyswans.com

Blow at High Dough

Set List:

New Orleans Is Sinking
The Depression Suite
Poets
Ahead By A Century
Fireworks
Morning Moon
Courage
Coffee Girl@
Wheat Kings@
Scared@
At the 100th Meridian
Springtime In Vienna
The Last Recluse
In View
Bobcaygeon
Family Band
My Music At Work
Blow At High Dough

Encore
Love Is A First
Grace, Too

Incredible ad for Sirius Canada made by BBDO in Toronto.  Features “A Blueprint” by Fear of Music.

Now only if Sirius/XM would bring back BoomBox Channel 39!