Soldier's Joy

The Duplicates

I've had a lot of questions about how this video was made so I thought I'd add a summary here.

All of the audio was prerecorded in my studio using Pro Tools. It was done with a click track and one track at a time starting with the guitar, then the bass, and then the rest of the lead instruments. It was then mixed and bounced. I put an mp3 of the song on my cell phone and used earbuds with my cell phone behind me so I could listen to the prerecorded audio and just play along with each instrument.

For the video, first I rearranged my whole living room, moving furniture, setting up lights. I also knew I was going to be doing green screening, which I've never done, but I know consistent lighting is crucial for it to look real so I put black curtains over the windows just the make sure outside light didn't affect the inside lighting.

I also figured that any movement of the camera would mess things up, so once the camera was set, I used a remote control to start and stop the recording.

Each video was recorded separately by hitting the record button on the video camera and then playing the audio on my cell phone and just playing along when I heard the song start.

All 5 videos were recorded separately. The guitar and bass are full screen videos with the entire background showing. For the mandolin, banjo, and fiddle, I set up a green screen as far back in the room as I could get and then for each player, I set the chair where I thought that player would be sitting and recorded them one at a time. So, in other words, each player was physically at the location shown in the final video. I also setup a fake mic in front of the banjo player that wasn't plugged in but it didn't show up as good in the final video as I thought.

In the video editing software (I use adobe premier pro), I took the full screen bass and guitar and put the 2 videos together with a crop right down the middle on opposite sides of each video so they would line up right at the edge of the filing cabinet (they say it's better to have a line of some sort where you do your crop). The other 3 players, which were green screened, were put on top of those previous 2 videos with the green screen simply removed. I used the audio from the video camera to sync to the audio from the prerecorded version so the videos would all line up.

The audio is all the prerecorded in my studio but I thought that might sound a little too fake, so right at the beginning the banjo player says "here's soldier's joy" and I kept that audio directly off the camera internal mic. I kept the room noise as well from that take all the way up until after the fiddle intro when all of the other instruments come in and then I muted that video camera mic and just let the prerecorded audio play.

This was my first time using a green screen and even though the lighting was the same, I never moved the camera, and I had a green screen not only behind me but also on the floor, after the final video was finished the feet of the front 3 players still looked a little weird. Whenever I would lift my foot, it seemed like it wasn't quite touching the ground. So to solve that, I just cropped the video, cropping most of the feet out.

Also, I had every light I own on in that room and it still seemed too dark so I had to lighten a few areas in the video editing software. There seems to never be enough light.

Anyway, that's basically how it was done. There is a lot more for me to learn but it's fun:)