sammi needham : cogitate

I’ve just finished working on a project for World Vision’s 40 Hour Famine. It’s a music video for a rapper named ‘MC Squared’ that you can edit and customise for your friends to watch.

We painted a green screen downstairs in the garage at our office to shoot it on then used After Effect’s Keylight plugin to key the characters back off. Keylight worked amazingly well and with the greatest of ease. It was basically the click of a button and the tiniest amount of tweaking. I hadn’t done keying before, but i highly recommend keylight for anyone giving it a go. It took about a month to put together from concept to finished product, or maybe a little less than that.

All of the audio was recorded at a recording studio next door to Sputnik Agency’s old office in St. Kilda. There’s a dude there called Brad that we’ve worked with a bit, he’s god value and now has a pretty impressive setup. [ Super Sonic Recordings ].

check it out here [ http://mcsquared.aaptbusiness.com.au ].

After many many years of using an old metal K&D shed shelving unit for a tv stand, the upgrade has finally happened. It feels like the end of something, the last piece of furniture in the loungeroom was still used at ahousenearyou. I even packed it up and bought it over to Melbourne when i moved. It will now be relegated to either the bin, or some sort of under-cover shelving in a cupboard somewhere in the study.

There’s a few holes at the moment, but the cabling is much more simplified now and almost completely invisible. There was a massively ugly pile of AV cables and powerboards before. And i don’t exactly mind cables, but even for me it was ugly as hell. Assuming that is, that hell is in fact ugly.

However the new thing is awesome. It’s a Stax from Freedom. It’s actually two pieces that con be configured in multiple ways, but it turns out that the gap between the two units is the absolute perfect size for the sub woofer to slot into. The sub has gone from looking like a heavy eye-sore sitting in a place that it didn’t seem to belong, into an almost invisible block in the new entertainment unit. The centre speaker fits snugly under the telly and there’s some good holes for a new media centre PC.