“Memory” video released

So the video for my lead single is finally done! This was shot at High Ridge Park and Stamford Transportation Center with my pal Pete Williamson.

High Ridge Park is an office center in Stamford, CT designed by Victor Bisharat, constructed between 1967 and 1975. It was intended to lure businesses away from NYC to the far-more-languid Stamford, but it’s not clear whether it ever had much success. Bisharat designed a number of commercial and residential structures in the area, but public opinion of his ultra-modern designs was always polarized. These days, they’re considered eyesores and anachronisms and the city can’t wait to demolish them.

The High Ridge Park buildings are still occupied (one of them is mostly demolished, as can be seen in the video), but it's clearly become pretty run down over the years - the main "hamburger/UFO" building was surrounded by a large fountain that’s currently drained, areas of concrete on the buildings are cracking and decaying, and the grounds aren’t kept up all that well.

The good news (kind of) is that it makes a fantastic dystopian video location, and nobody seems to mind if you shoot all day long. I actually shot two days - the first on a Sunday with Pete, and the next Saturday, I returned alone and shot a bunch of footage inside the hamburger building (which was unlocked, lucky for me). I only saw two other people that day: one was the sushi caterer (apparently that's a thing during the week) and the other was a lady working on Saturday who seemed more concerned about disturbing me than the other way around.

Stamford Transportation Center pedestrian bridge, as seen from the 95 freeway.

Location number 2 was the pedestrian bridge at Stamford Transportation Center (i.e. MTA train station) that connects the parking structure to the actual station. It’s a super-rad location because as you can see in the pic above, it’s REALLY long and it looks Space 1999. It’s so long, I felt like I could’ve sung the entire song while walking.

(This actually wouldn’t happen though, because I kept messing up the words. It may sound weird, but even though it’s my song and I had heard it a million times, because I record in chunks, I had never had sung it all the way through. And on top of that, it’s one of those songs where the words are similar but slightly different from chorus to chorus. This seems real clever when you’re writing and recording it, but it’s a total pain when you have to actually memorize the thing.)

In order to avoid the work commute crowd, we did the main shots of me on a Sunday. We immediately ran into a surly old security guy who told us we could only shoot for a couple minutes, but he disappeared and never returned, so we kept going. We saw a couple other younger security guys, but they were nice and didn't mind. We had to occasionally pause when people would walk through, but all in all, it wasn't a big deal. I returned the next week to get B-roll footage (i.e. shots without me in them). Toward the end of the video, I actually used matted bridge footage of myself on the "empty" tunnel background - this allowed me to make myself intermittently disappear.

SO much magnetic maskquerading.

Speaking of which, I edited the video myself in Final Cut Pro, and used their "magnetic mask" feature extensively. It allows you to select an object in a video clip (like a person) and "mask out" everything else. I used this to adjust color and brightness for myself independently of backgrounds, as well as to artificially create shallow-depth-of-field effects (i.e. blurred backgrounds). More obviously, I used the magnetic mask to do the "TV fuzz" transitions and "trails" ghost effects. None of these effects were that hard to do, but they were time consuming because there are so many of them. And for the fuzz effects and transitions, every flicker is a manual blade edit, so that takes ages.

Finally, I wanted to mention the slightly miraculous tidbit that the entire thing was shot on my base-model iPhone 16, which isn’t even the fancy “pro” one that’s better suited to video. The only trick is that we used a DJI Osmo Mobile 8 gimbal, which is very nifty device that acts as a steadicam and includes a tracker that allows it to automatically follow an object (like a person). The tracking function isn’t that necessary when you’re behind the camera shooting, but it’s super helpful when you’re shooting yourself - all of the footage of me inside the “hamburger” was shot solo with it.

I already have the concept for the next video as well as a willing collaborator. It will be for "Alive Tonight," and totally different than the "Memory" vid.