Playing With Fire
...or filming outside in the cold.
I play bass and sing for alt rock band, Kobayashi, comprising Croydon residents, Matt and Alan, and Brightonian, Mark.
In chilly January 2012 the band's partners left for warmer climes and distant endeavours for a weekend. This could mean only one thing for the boys back at home: road trip.
Kobayashi have long been disassociated from the traditional rock and roll lifestyle, and so booked two nights at a quaint cottage in the Cotswolds, Gloucestershire. We drew straws for our rooms, unpacked the rockumentary DVDs and turned the heating up to eleven. From the patio, we could ponder the stars while quaffing fine wine and local scrumpy. Crapulent, rural bliss.
We had two rules for the holiday:
- None of us should feel compelled to perform or write music.
- I would not be obliged to film any of it.
We all packed our instruments; I packed my camera.
Four men in a country cottage would usually forecast a messy stag do, so in order to convince the owner we really were nice blokes, we took our music outdoors among the fields, marshland, and horse manure. We braved swamps and ornithologists in search of locations to film songs from our current EP, Everything to Everyone.
This film is the second we've released in the last year while we completed our 2012 gig schedule and started to write our next record. Brief production notes are below the video, and you can view this film and Kobayashi's previous creations on our YouTube channel.
For me it brings back fond (yet incomplete) memories of our time away from the city.
Playing With Fire (Acoustic) from James Rampton on Vimeo.
View this on Kobayashi's YouTube channel.
To reduce the weight on my back, and in favour of a guitar, I left the tripod at home. This meant our angles were limited to where we and the camera could rest comfortably. This turned out to be a good restriction that made us think about the landscape and our surroundings that much more. In this video, we posed ourselves in front of the lake and I framed the shot using a Tamron 75-250m. The camera (a Canon 5Dmk2) was placed on top of a tree stump. In fact, tree stumps proved to be a great support solution for the other videos, too: people don't tend to cut them at an angle.
All the footage was filmed in natural light, and was edited and graded with Final Cut Studio 3.
I recorded the audio using a Zoom H4n, which has been the single most versatile and essential piece of studio gear I've bought in recent years. I'm impressed with the way it dealt with the different sound sources, but I'd not have been able to get a clean signal without a Redhead windshield. You can see the wind in the grass to the left but it's almost imperceptible on the sound recording because of the brilliant Redhead.
As Kobayashi writes the follow-up to Everything to Everyone, I'm looking forward to breaking out the camera bag again and seeing what we can achieve.
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