indie music: August 2010 Archives

Indie Label: DIY style 9 - Douban page

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qu logo
We have successfully launched our label page today on Douban:


We have officially reached step four!

If you are not are not a Douban member then you won't see the download arrows, but they are there. OK. First the concept and then the details of putting a page on Douban.

I guess the pre-net model of existing as a business or venture was to have an office, or an address. These days you can do it with a web site. Of course, you can run an indie label out of your bedroom and just hand out flyers and stuff at gigs - but having a web page validates your existence and is also a handy tool for promoting yourself. I'm on Douban therefor I am. 

Indie Label: DIY style 8 - video

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Read this for the story of the video shoot and some stills.

This post may well seem self-explanatory to someone with an expert knowledge of digital video, if so, please help us out in the comments, thanks.

So. We finished editing the video for Little Punk's I'm Not in the Mood for Making a Song. At the same time, our other act, Pairs, submitted their video for Yangpu Qu. The next step was to upload them to a China based streaming site for easy public consumption.

We accept that putting videos onto streaming sites like Youku results in grainy pictures and quality loss for regular users. It's painful but everyone is aware of it and knows it's not the 'real quality'. However, Yangpu Qu went up there without much change, some loss yes, but satisfactory. The Little Punk vid, on the other hand, was butchered both in picture and sound. 

Yangpu Qu was shot on a Pentax Optio S55 compact camera directly into an MP4 format and then edited on Windows Movie Maker. The format, and the amount of information in the file, was about the same as that used on Youku. I'm Not in the Mood was shot on a Canon XL2 digital movie camera and edited in Adobe Premier Pro to produce a TV quality AVI file. It then must be converted for web use - and then Youku, or any site, converts it again. The infamous double conversion. No matter how we tried it, the sound becomes peaked and the picture pixelated. 

Finally we tried Youku's suggestion of downloading their Iku desktop upload manager and sending up the entire 600MB+ AVI file. It still came out the same.

Here they are:




Ren hang night
First and last pics by Damen

As I have been blogging here, we have had Beijing based photographer Ren Hang down for this indie event

Here's a review of it over at Layabozi. More here about that soon.

While he was down, Ren Hang was in photo overdrive and I also had him shoot the two artists on our indie label project. You can read about the shoot with Pairs right ... here. And by the way, hot tip, two of the finished tracks we did with them are up early at that link.

On Monday night we wanted to shoot both Little Punk and Boojii, who had played our show on Saturday. 

We wanted a surreal decaying location for a night shoot. Whenever I come through Zhongshan Park on the light rail (line 3) southbound, I always see a large abandoned lot that is completely overgrown. It also contains an old French school house and some other partially demolished buildings. Art scene friends had told me that they had previously hopped the wall and used the inside of the perimeter for graffiti. 

Firstly, I made an advance trip and dummy run on an earlier day. There is a regular gate and a couple of guards in a box at the top entrance, exactly next to Changning Road and Kaixuan Road where the train passes overhead. The place to climb the wall, where it is lowest, is where the lane passes the old school house. I could get over it but dropping down the other side is not for everyone, so I planned to get a ladder (see below pic). 

We used the inside of the school house for most of the shoot, we had nine of us over the wall without major incident. The inside was dark and we needed flashlights, a couple of fancy phones sorted that out as it happened. The room at the top of the tower was amazing and full of ruined vintage furniture. The four storey stairwell had no inner walls or banisters though so consenting adults only. 

The shoot was amazing and getting out was the funniest part. I hopped back over with the ladder and then the others walked up to the far end and told the guards they had wandered in at the other end and had no idea where they were. The guards let them out through the gate. 


wall ladder

stairwell

About this Archive

This page is a archive of entries in the indie music category from August 2010.

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