30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Thirteen – The Damage Is Done

Day Thirteen and The Damage Is Done, wherein I’ve learned one or two lessons from the earlier videos. I don’t seem to be gawping as vacantly in this one as in previous songs, though the camera-staring is a little unnerving. I need to work out where to place my eyes. In an ideal world, I would have a 2nd camera recording the song from a different angle to break up with the stare-line, but I tried that on one of the first videos and it was a nightmare to edit with the technology that I have. Final Cut needed ten minutes to render the slight change in the sequence and in iMovie I can’t figure out how to sync video and audio for multiple cameras. iMovie has become my default editing software, just because it’s the simplest.

The whole process of recording these videos takes somewhere between 3 and 4 hours. Recording the song takes about an hour. Then I go through the various takes to work out which is least bad, trim the chosen footage, import it into iMovie, add the credits and transitions, sometimes I extract the audio and normalise it using Audacity, export the video, post it to YouTube, write the clattermonger.com blog post, Facebook it and Tweet it. There are ways I’ve speeded up the process, and there are times when I’m importing and exporting and uploading when I can get on with other things.

From my point of view, it’s definitely worth it. It’s a relief to get a song such as The Damage is Done, which has been sitting patiently in my pile of songs for anything up to 15 or 20 years, out into the world. In my mind, it needs to be sung by someone like Percy Sledge or even Willy Nelson. Here, obviously, it’s just me. Ah well, you can’t have everything!