A Birthday Happy-Song

Franklin and I made a birthday-song for his sister today, and then we made a video complete with stop-motion animation, subliminal cat footage, and socially awkward lions.

Here it is:



instruments: flutophone, ukulele, bongos & tambourine

Franklin's sister Lindsey has her birthday a day before mine, and, a few years ago we kinda started this unofficial tradition where we'd leave each other homemade birthday songs via voicemail, since our birthdays are so close. Franklin & I thought it'd be fun to make something more substantial this year. We hope she likes it!


and we hope you dig it, too!

-Elizabeth

Take a Trip: Our stay at Doe Bay

Ahh, Doe Bay. I miss it already. Franklin made a sweet video with the footage we got on our anniversary trip last month. I think video-editing/film-making is becoming his new favorite hobby, heehee. It's so fun to film+edit, and I'm so happy that we have another thing we both enjoy and can share and work on together. Here's the sweet little video he put together:


Location: Doe Bay Resort & Retreat
Music: One of a Very Few of a Kind - Of Montreal

I love capturing video of our adventures - it's like we get to relive our memories every time we watch 'em. I have a bunch of video I took when we lived in California for a short while, and it's so nostalgically satisfying to be able to watch those bits and pieces from that almost-forgotten part of our past. Our memories are fallible and become skewed over time, but video is typically objective and honest, so you can trust it better than your own noggin sometimes. It reminds me of this quote from the movie Slacker, haha.

Anyway, that's all I have to share today. I've been trying to stick to brooch-making this weekend. A shop-owner in Poulsbo contacted me about selling my cat lady brooches in her store, on consignment, so I'm workin' extra hard to get that ready to go. I've never made so many brooches at once before, it's crazy.

-Elizabeth

Musical Meet + Greet

Last weekend we invited various musician friends to our house to play a song or two, and to discuss how everyone creates their individual noises. 

My primary goal of the night was to gain various perspectives on the music-making process, and document the night with my 8-track, record everything from 2 overhead mics, with 2 separate camcorders (a tablet (horrible video!), and Sony Cybershot (actually not too bad!)), and put everything together throughout the week on Elizabeth's mac. 

...We did everything but the music-making discussion.  Not so bad! But next time, I'm thinking I should probably be a bit more "hostly", and direct the events to hold more discourse.  I think everyone would agree, that was an important aspect that was sorely missing.  We got some sweet footage though, and I had a great time both during the event, and throughout the week, learning how to use imovie.

Meet n' Greet montage
this is a song Elizabeth and I made a while back, that had been on the back burner for a while.  Everyone was kind enough to jump in, and we had a short song with most everyone participating!  We didn't have a whole lot of footage from that performance, so I put together a "teaser trailer" of sorts, to accompany the song.

Leaf Colors
Jeremy came by, and played a few songs!  We weren't able to get much footage from all the songs he played (technical difficulties/rapt attention), but luckily we we able to capture "Tatooine Blues", one of my favorites.  Scotty couldn't stop talking about Jeremy after the night wound down.

Sea Hearts
Justin and Tim got together and wrote this song over the course of 2 practices prior to the Meet!  This kinda has an Iggy Pop turned gansta feel to it.  Haha, I'm excited to hear what they come up with next!

 Red Hot Buckshot
I've known Ben (dreads), since high school, but it was my first time meeting brothers Jon and Jared.  They all played a slew of songs, solo and in a group, but I think this was my favorite.  Jon had this Darby Crash meets Joey Ramone kinda sound that I really dug.  This song has been in my head all week!

stoic + pariah
And finally Elizabeth and I played a song we made about a History Channel series called "Ancient Aliens" haha.  We were kinda obsessed with the show for about a week.  Enough to write a song about it.

I'd like to hold the event again, with maybe more people, and a firmer course towards the discussion of the music-making process.  Less wine for me! Maybe in a month or 2, be on the lookout for a lame documentary-style video(s), based around the musically-inclined friends and acquaintances we have from around the Puget Sound.

-Franklin

Take a Trip: To The Beach

Franklin and I decided that we want to start documenting all our trips and adventures by recording video footage and collecting bits of things from that area (like dirt, leaves, etc). Last week, we went on our first [documented] adventure: We went to the beach.

We scooped up some sand, and found some pretty rocks that caught our eye, and found a twig that had been weathered to the point that it felt all light & papery-weird, and not very twig-like at all. We decided that we wanna keep all our adventure specimens in baby food jars. I think I might paint the lids all different colors, and maybe build a special shelf to keep them on. Right now, this is all we have, but we hope to continue documenting our adventures like this, indefinitely. The only thing I wonder about, is what sort of things we'd collect in a big city sort of adventure. Sidewalk gum? haha. I don't even know. We'll see when we get there, I suppose.

oh, and here is our [hopefully] exciting video:



We tried to give it the feel of an old home video from the 60s or 70s. I added a cheesy film grain effect, and changed the speed, to make it feel more awkward and choppy -  like an old super 8 home movie. The widescreen aspect detracts from that feeling, haha, but it was the best I could do with what I had! Speaking of which, Franklin and I found an old Kodak brownie 8mm movie camera at the thrift store a few weeks ago, and we're so excited to use it! We just need to track down some film first.

-Elizabeth

Sweeter Than Candy on a Stick

We made a video! Wanna see?



I sort of daydreamed it on the way home from work yesterday, haha. It was hard convincing Franklin to participate, but by the time we were done, he wanted to keep on dancing, haha. I'd been trying to get him to work on more videos with me, and now that he sees how easy (and fun!) it is, he'll probably be more into it. It's not so mysterious now, haha. This was my first time using a green screen, too, so that's kind of exciting. The green screen part only lasts for a few seconds, and it looks pretty bad, haha, but I kinda love how awful it looks.

Oh, and some details about the outfit: The dress is thrifted, and altered. It used to be long-sleeved and down to my ankles, but I fixed that problem! The socks, I think I got at Fred Meyer. They're a really good place to find knee-high and over-the-knee socks. I used to be SUPER obsessed with knee high socks, and have recently found myself obsessing over them again. The sweater, thrifted, and the shoes, Minnetonka. Oh, and the brooch: handmade. Oh, and Franklin's sweet shirt is from a vintage shop, his jeans are from the thrift store, and his shoes... wait a minute, he isn't wearing any shoes! What a strange young man.

Okay, that's all. I was just really excited to finish that video. Our internet connection is so bad it took over an hour to upload to youtube, haha. We hope you like it! :)

-Elizabeth

Cheesy Montage Videos: A Day in Summer

I have a slight obsession with making montage videos. It really beats flipping through still photographs, in that you can capture those moments with music and motion, which adds to that sweet nostalgic sensation that I crave. I usually can't patch together anything longer than a minute and a half, though, haha. This video was no exception. It gets a little weak at the end, when I obviously start running out of footage, haha. I still like the way it captured our lazy day at home. I'm excited to make & share more.

ONWARD!




-Elizabeth

Future Projects!

I never like to start new projects when I've got some obligation that needs immediate attention -- in the case for this month, it's been MOVING. I'm really bad at packing to move. I spend a lot of time sitting and staring, or trying to memorize where I put every little thing. "Okay... I need to remember... that this little scrap of fabric... is going right here." Sigh! The process of packing things into boxes, which shouldn't take long at all, has taken me all of a month. But we're making the move in two days! So after that, we can finally commence to makin' stuff!

The project that I have at the top of my list is a video project I wanna work on with Franklin. When we were doing the long-distance-relationship thing, Franklin and I made a bunch of songs for each other. The ones I made were ridiculously short and embarrassingly silly, but, I really want to go back to those songs we made each other and make videos for them - together!

Here is the first one I made him, and the first one we'll make a new video for:

"good things"


I didn't have any sort of audio program on my computer, so I used iMovie to piece together audio tracks so I could have multiple tracks playing at once. The problem with using iMovie, though, was that the end product was a video, not an mp3 file! So I had to lazily whip up some videos to accompany the songs, so I could send them to him via youtube. They're pretty awful. I was watching a lot of sesame street with my nephew around the time I made this video, if you couldn't tell. I still want to incorporate the sock puppet theme into the new video for this song but maybe use something a little less creepy. Yes, I put lipstick on my sock -- and, no, it didn't wash out. I mean, what else was I supposed to do?

-Elizabeth