Last night, Tod & I were inducted into the Butterfly Project, Swinky’s collection of casual music videos.
Jesse brought a ton of equipment from their studio and while I made us some dinner, Jesse set up a six-mic-four-camera studio in our living room, including my special double mic stand kludged together with chopsticks and hoop tape.
Maybe these Butterflies aren’t so casual after all?
It was the first time the four of us had played and sung together. There was much laughter over bad jokes and our numerous mistakes. We rehearsed for a hour or so, then ate dinner sitting in the empty places between cables.
We recorded seven takes before we had something all of us agreed was good. But as Jesse checked the files and we took apart the equipment, he discovered a problem. The audio recorder failed mysteriously. There were no files at all on its card. So we scrambled to fix the device and put the studio back together before it got too late and the neighbours complained. (It was 11 pm before we finished, but nobody said anything, whew!) We did three more recordings and got a final take that included mistakes and laughter – a perfect representation of the evening.
Now Jesse gets to edit all the video and audio recordings into something that looks like we just walked into the room and started playing.
The video will be up on the Butterfly Project page by the end of the month. It was so much fun to do. I hope we’ll get to play with Swinky and Jesse again soon.
