Brendan Smith the Director, Editor and member of the Unwinding Hours talks about how he made a Music Video on the Flip Video Camera.

The song is called ’Peaceful Liquid Shell’ from the self-titled debut album out now on Chemikal Underground Records.

“I am the keyboard player in the band and I am also a Director with a video production company in Glasgow, Enterprise Screen Productions.

I am used to shooting on Sony Z1′s, Z7′s and Canon 5D’s but for this project, these were impractical and expensive to take on the tour. I borrowed a 1st generation Flip camera from a friend of mine because I had heard that they are small, shoot decent quality video and are extremely versatile. I was reasonably confident that I could make the footage work, provided we shot enough of it and I worked hard on the post-production process. Flip offered a nice, simple way to capture the images for me to work on with the skill-base I have.

The camera offered a ‘fun’ level of versatility – several of the shots were achieved by gaffa taping the camera to lighting rigs, amps, mic stands and monitors – this would not have been possible with another camera, without expensive rigging. The small size of the Flip was advantageous but it is also very easy to “point and shoot” and get excellent results with the auto functions of the camera: No white balance or iris adjustments etc are necessary and as I was concentrating on playing a gig each night, all I wanted to have to do was hit one button and record.

The idea behind the video was to film 11 different gigs from 11 different angles and then cut together a performance video along with additional footage from the tour. This allowed all members of the band to be involved to an extent and also gave me the opportunity to shoot a lot of footage.

As I was using a 1st generation flip cam and the footage was shot 4:3  640×480 I had to work a lot harder with the image than I would have liked to, had I used the newer range of high def Flips which shoot in 1280×720 16:9, I would not have had the same problem.

I edited the video in Final Cut Pro and because of the 4:3 aspect ratio I decided to use a number of different filters and effects to create an 8mm film look from the tour footage. I graded the live performance material by desaturating the image and boosting contrast levels to balance the different performances. (amongst a bunch of other things) I cropped footage that I shot of the road to make a 16:9 image and layered that throughout the video to give me a widescreen template to work with. I had a couple of tricks that I employed during the shooting of material, some of which I will keep to myself but they involved altering the image directly – a luxury affordable with the footage we could shoot.

The Unwinding Hours are about to embark on another European tour and I would like to shoot a tour diary. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the Flip cam this time, but I have an iphone 4 which shoots 720p. I am not overly impressed with the lens on the iphone and the audio recording isn’t great so I may need to come up with some other plans for post production. I want to keep things simple and the less gear I have the better – particularily as I have a lot of equipment to deal with on stage.”