One Tiny Thing

One Tiny Thing from Lauren Eldekvist on Vimeo.

On the 26th of April Amanda Palmer, Damian Kulash, Neil Gaiman and Ben folds went into a studio to write an 8 track album in 8 hours and 'One Tiny Thing' is one of the resulting songs. Anyone following me on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook will know how excited I got about this project. I think sometimes you can learn more by doing a project like this than you can from spending months of thinking and planning. There's nothing like being thrown in at the deep end to force you into action.

Someone on twitter suggested they make 6 music videos in 12 days (like they did the 6 songs in 12 hours) and the chalenge was then passed on to anyone listening to make a video as quickly as possible.

I thought, as much as I wanted to, that I wouldn't be able to do it because I'm basically in a bubble here. None of my creative friends live close enough or are available enough to drop everything and make a video.

I went to bed thinking about if there was some way of doing it alone. I figured 'One Tiny Thing' was the best choice as it was vague enough to do pretty much anything visually and make it work. Then I started thinking about the cycle path and the bluebells. At 1:30am I turned the lights back on and got out of bed. I'd loosely storyboarded the first minute or so by 2am and then went to sleep.

Almost exactly 24 hours later the finished video was rendering.

It's worth noting that I have not done any video work in a LONG time and never shot anything like this by myself before. Nor have I ever done much editing (truth be told I never enjoyed editing, shooting is fun but editing always drove me crazy and I avoided it). This is the first substantial thing I have ever shot on a DSLR, I used my 60D and a 50mm f/1.8 and got the hang of it very quickly. If you've never shot video on one before I recommend it, much easier than I would have predicted.

There may be a lot of oddly timed cuts going on as my poor old laptop couldn't play back what I had done properly so I couldn't really see what was happening most of the time, a lot of it was guess work; 'well that shot was 1.5s so I'll make this one 3s'. That combined with my lack of editing skills and patience makes for a pretty rough edit. BUT I DON'T EVEN CARE!

I'm really glad I did it. It felt really good to finish something and try new things and generally be creative and run about in a beautiful setting with my sister. We shot everything in, I think, under 2 hours (we couldn't work out what time we left home/got there/started shooting) and I edited it in probably about an hour (after about 5 hours of my laptop just REFUSING to cooperate).


Hear and buy the album HERE (do it!).
Amanda Palmer's blog HERE with photos taking during writing/recording, videos of the talk they gave the next morning and the first and only performance of some of the songs they wrote as well as some solo material.