Elton John's "Your Thong"

Mark just recorded and made a video for his version of Elton John's "Your Song." This one's, well, a little different! For details on the song, check out the music blog entry.
 萬一搖滾巨星艾爾頓強有點口齒不清，老將“S"的音發成”TH"。他的經典老歌 “Your Song" 會有怎麼樣的發展呢？
小幫助： 這是首讓人開懷的歌。在美國 Thong 有兩個常用的意思。有興趣多了解的可以看看 http://www.thefreedictionary.com/thong

Read on for more tech details. :)


Since the room is not soundproof and my large diaphragm condenser mics are pretty sensitive, I've always been concerned about some scooter whizzing past the window, someone talking outside, or the guys upstairs starting some project with power tools, but no one was up at that hour! It goes both ways, I'm sure, so I hope I didn't wake anyone.

The guitar was recorded direct in one take and the vocals were done in about 3 or 4 takes. Pretty straight ahead! :)

The video was fun to make! I've been creating images in Freehand 10, a terrific vector drawing program that goes head-to-head with Adobe Illustrator. The whole thing is drawn with a mouse and filled in with various gradients. The gradients don't look as good when the whole thing gets dumped down to JPEGs, but it will do. I'll have to see if I can make a flash presentation out of it somehow. Maybe that will work better.

The cool thing about the vector drawing is that I can adjust it point by point rather than pixel by pixel. that allows me to change object outlines very quickly. I can also set different elements on different layers so I can manipulate one thing or another without affecting everything. I change or add a few things, export the current image as a JPEG and move on to the next manipulation. It's a fun process. The entire video is about 120 slides.

Right now, I'm putting everything together in VideoPad--the trial version, which works just fine except for the fact that you have to reinstall it every 2 weeks. No worries. I'm happy with the limitation, certainly at zero cost.

I was lucky that the tempo for "Your Thong" is exactly two seconds per measure--totally unplanned and done completely without a click track. I just happened to hit that time right on the money, so I could just set the default time for new slides to 00:02:00 in VideoPad and know that every slide I import will last one full measure. There are a couple of places where I got a little rubato, and I adjusted for those, but that's it. Really easy this time. The Police's "Feelings" was considerably trickier since I had to tweak the timing to get each beat exactly right. Too bad VideoPad doesn't have the BPM (beats per minute) option. That would have helped.

Anyway, it was great fun putting it together. Ping helped me with a couple of key concepts and we were off and running on this one! Enjoy!