Happy Record Store Day 2010!

To celebrate, I’d like to share the playlist above from Thunders‘ 2009 set at the Indianapolis record store Indy CD & Vinyl. Shot on a Sony HDRFX1 with audio from a wireless mono mic in the back of the room, it’s been culled from the archives and placed on Vimeo for your internet video viewing pleasure.

Today I share a most overdue post – the second and final episode of the RockitBomb.TV pilot project. I am happy to post an interview and set opener from Russian Circles, an amazing band that I have had the fortune to see multiple times, as well as the honor of sharing a bill with them via Thin Fevers.

Check out Andy and Annie’s interview, and the band’s set opener from the April 23rd, 2009 show at Radio Radio .

For anyone who missed my previous post – this project was a collaboration that I embarked on last summer with A2 Industries. Unfortunately, due to my career change, and A2 busy bringing awesome to Indianapolis, the project has been indefinitely shelved.

Thanks to the guys in Russian Circles and A2 for being awesome to work with!

We shot three pilot episodes, the first of which was an interview with Tim Barry, formerly of Avail. We got to sit down with Tim for an interview, the folks at NationalUnderground.org were kind enough to lend us some archival footage, and we got footage of Tim performing two great songs at Local’s Only in Indianapolis.

Special thanks to Those Young Lions, NationalUnderground.org, and A2 for working with me on this project, the “as final as it is going to get” cut is below for your viewing pleasure:

It has been too long since I have posted. Happy Holidays from my family and I!

This weekend was a blast. My son went to Grandma and Grandpa’s for the weekend, while Jen and had a busy weekend full of the fun work.

The video above is of Today The Moon Tomorrow The Sun playing at The Indieana Handicraft Exchange.  TTMTTS is an insanely great band from Atlanta Georgia, playing at an insanely great event that Amanda and Neal Taflinger helm. Thin Fevers was fortunate enough to get to share a bill with them later that night at Local’s Only to an unfortunately small crowd. However, those in attendance left with melted eye-balls à la Raiders of the Lost Ark – if you ever have a chance to see this band, do.

Day two of the Handicraft Exchange was equally as fun – EleanorMac did very well, and while Jen was selling, I was busy buying from Mike Altman, Clinton Reno, and some other vendors.

All in all, a great weekend.

Part one of a series of posts about making a music video.

I’ve decided to write a series of posts about my newest project, a video for We Are Hex’s “Bottom of My Belly” from their record “Gloom Boom.” I’m fortunate to be collaborating with talented folks from Larry Ladig Photography, Hi Def Pics, and Birkhead Editorial.

From the band’s website: “We Are Hex is a messy pile of pop slop… booming keyboards, precise and spaced out guitar, blown out bass, led by a barrage of drums . The rhythmic vocals pace themselves with the kick, conveying sex and sadness. The lyrics are deceptively self-aware in their simplicity.”

The record is crazy good, and I highly recommend you get it from their BandCamp site.

How I Found Myself Accidentally Doing What I’d always wanted to Do

I’ve always loved music, and I’ve always loved music videos. I didn’t have MTV growing up, but we had VH1, and many an afternoon was spent watching Phil Collins videos. My foray into creating music videos, however,  started with my own band, Thin Fevers.  In the spring of 2008, for some reason we decided we needed to enter a music video contest, so we ended up with this simple, but great video for “Idiot Archipelago.” Part “Take On Me” and part “Godzilla,” it was a lot of fun, and we shot and cut it in a very long, hot day.

After that I found myself doing some live work with Jookabox, and that landed me a quick gig making another video for the (at the time) solo artist.

These project were great, especially great considering their “we have a camera and some lights, lets screw around” approach. For “Bottom of My Belly” I’ve approached the project very deliberately, planning, story-boarding, and collaborating. I have no desire to pigeonhole myself, so I’ve been spending a lot time with graph paper and a little time with Final Cut Pro to get a sketch going.

In my next post I will be sharing some of my storyboards and talking about how I’ve dove into this project. I’d love to hear feedback on these pieces in the comments and find out if there any specifics people reading may want to know. This is going to be an exciting project, and something that I think will end up being a really cool piece of work.

Last week I volunteered to help out with SmallerIndiana.com‘s Bigger Ideas conference in downtown Indianapolis. My friend PK and I seem to be getting in the habit of producing event journalism around town. PK ran the camera while I ran around and gathered up people to be interviewed by Indianapolis meteorologist Paul Poteet.

Paul and PK where great to work with, and we got some great interviews with some amazing people at the event.

Follow PK on Twitter

Follow Paul Poteet on Twitter

I was digging through some draft posts, and realized I never posted this, so consider this a lost and found piece. The video player above features a series of videos that my friend PK and I put together a few months ago for the Indiana Humanities Council during a First Friday salon with The Mind Trust.

The Mind Trust is a pretty cool education organization, and they are behind some pretty great programs. If you have time, they are worth learning more about.

I couldn’t make it out last night, but I made it out to Finding Fiction at Luna, and here are a couple of acoustic songs, featuring my favorite one, “Less than Love.” If you missed it, check out last week’s interview with Mario.

-Brian