Art Beresheim

Tre Avritt and I organized and shot a music video for Par Avion. Our idea was to make a live performance video like the show “Live from Abbey Road”. “Live from Abbey Road” is shot in the legendary Abbey Road studio in England. The format of the show is just a mini concert from the studio. There are multiple live camera’s on every person in the band. We had about 3 weeks to get the entire video done so we first looked to our video major friends to help us shoot the video since that we needed to shoot multiple cameras at the same time. We enlisted Artem Avakian, Sean Lowery, Josh Hackney, and Jonathan Davis to help us light and shoot the video.

We first tried to do the shoot completely live, but quickly found out that wouldn’t work. There were a couple problems with this plan one being the loud drums. The drums were very loud and actually triggering the vocoder that the lead singer was singing through. Also the video guys wanted to get more shots than we could in just one run through. So we quickly moved the keyboard into the isolation booth and recorded a good live performance of the song. We then just played back the track to them through their headphones and they synced their performance with the previously recorded track. This worked out very well because this allowed the video guys to get allot more cool and interesting shots as they were now able to move lighting in-between takes.

After the shoot came the long and tedious process of editing the video which I did myself in Final Cut Pro. The way I went about editing it was syncing up every shot with the music in a different layer. This allowed me to pick from every shot that happened at the correct spot in the song. I picked which shot I liked and put the splice into the top layer so that it would be part of my final edit. When my final edit was done Sean Lowery color corrected it for me.

Mixing the song was like mixing a live performance.  Their backing track was a mono send coming from their laptop that I mixed everything around.   The vocoder vocal line was just a DI straight from the keyboard which made the sound really electronic so I re-amped the part through a studio monitor and re-recorded that sound with a SM7-B.  This made it sound less electronic and more rounded of a vocal sound that was not as harsh on the ear.  I drum replaced the kick and the snare drum with the plugin Drummagog.