Earlier this week I launched my new site, vaullt.com. VAULLT was initially created to showcase my ongoing video work but also to experiment with HTML5 & CSS3.

One of the nice features of VAULLT is the ability to overlay & combine popular video effects, such as Sepia, Old Film & Letter Box over any of the videos to create your own viewing experience.

As the site uses the HTML5 element, several browsers are not supported including Internet Explorer. Fear not because the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome & the recently launched Opera 10.50 beta all support the video embedding.

Check out VAULLT and in the coming weeks I will be posting a tutorial on how to create the FX for use on images or videos.

Today a friend of mine sent me an email with a link to the poster of Peter Jackson’s latest offering ‘Lovely Bones’, because it resembled the album artwork I designed for the album ‘Love, Blood, Family, You’ by Escape Fails, released in July 2008.

Quite astounded by the similarities I grabbed a screen shot of the two and placed them together.

The tree, the birds, the clouds even the placement and the rays of the sun bare an eerie resemblance to my design.

As well as appearing in the album (top selling album of the week in Zavvi, July 2008) & in my portfolio, the artwork also appears extensively on the bands myspace page and their website.

Send me your thoughts on twitter: @tejcore

For a web designer the end result is typically always the same, but the process to produce a website can often differ depending on the varying methods used by the designer.

I tend to start a new design by sketching out potential ideas then develop the preferred layout into a wireframe in Photoshop. When correctly implemented it provides a visual guide for laying out the structure of each page and also caters for developing variations in the layout in order to maintain consistency throughout the site.

The final stage in my creative process is to design a comprehensive layout so I can visually illustrate how a site will appear on the web once it is built, by fleshing out the wireframes with branding, colour, chosen typefaces, content, navigation, images and other visual elements.

Below is a time-lapse video I created for my preferred design process.

Every now and then I get a nice surprise when checking the Traffic Sources to my website. Over the past few months I’ve been honoured to find my portfolio featured on several leading design blogs.

Francesco Mugnai – Top 40 “hello” pages

Das Web Design Blog – In 4 Tagen zum Portfolio – Tag 2: Recherche

Spyre Studios – Showcase Of 50 Stunning Portfolio Website Designs

Thanks to all the sites & bloggers who have so kindly showcased this very site and hopefully others have found it inspiring.

Well its Tuesday now and I’m back at work so I’m not sure I will get a chance to meet up with Matt and do anything more on the video for a few days so I’m using this time to look at tutorials, mainly Adobe After Effects for the post-production. I’ll be honest, I’ve never used After Effects before, other than having opened the program and stared blankly at an empty timeline wishing I knew what I was doing.

So far I have received great feedback from friends on twitter after posting yesterdays blog and I’d like to thank everyone for their feedback, support and comments.

The point of this music video is to prove to ourselves and hopefully other unsigned bands or budding movie makers that you don’t need to spend a lot of money or even have any prior directing or editing skills to make a movie. All you need is the time, effort, willingness and patience to learn (a family member with a HD mini-cam also helps). This continues to be a learning curve for me and hopefully the outcome will produce a music video that all involved can be proud of.

In previous posts I’ve shown stills from the video and I thought it would be interesting to show a few behind the scenes photos from the day of the shoot.

Left: This is the HD mini-cam we shot the whole video on and no we are not embarressed | Right: Save money by not hiring a cherry picker, just use your vocalist!

Left: Rocking tha mic | Right: Time for a close-up

You can view more images on our facebook page and don’t forget to check out the preview of the video in the previous post or here on youtube.

So yesterday Matt and myself spent our sunny Sunday locked away in my makeshift editing room, which consisted of my girlfriends laptop, running a trial version of Sony Vegas Pro 9, connected to my 32” HDTV, all neatly set upon our Ikea dining table, with the grand purpose to finish the first edit of our sans-million dollar music video.

A total of 16 hours over the weekend of editing raw footage, 3 Sony Vegas software crashes and several table thumps later, I present to you a world exclusive preview of ‘In the Arms of the Storm’ by Escape Fails (This is just the raw edit with no effects or filters added)

Next stage is to run it by some lucky people for feedback and comments, a final edit and then some post production to smooth it out.

Thanks so far to Matt for all his hard work & my girlfriend Gemma for letting us use her laptop (mine couldn’t handle the processor intensive video editing…time for an upgrade) and for not minding me turning our living room into a make shift editing room.

Tweet me you thoughts to @escapefails or @tejcore

Last week my band Escape Fails packed up and headed off to shoot a music video for ‘In The Arms of the Storm’, a track from our debut album that we released last year.

I had talked with my nephew, Matt several months back after being impressed with a video he made for a university project and asked if he would be kind enough to film it for us.

Armed with only a pink HD Mini-Cam, a tripod from the 70’s and the hope of good weather we drove to our scenic location and set up. Ignoring many confused looks from by passers as to why we were mimicking a full scale onslaught of rock at a popular tourist location, we began shooting the video. At this stage I should point out that we had no budget, no storyboard other than the thoughts in my head and the direction from Matt, no professional equipment and acting skills were on stand by.

This weekend Matt and I made a start on the editing. I have worked on a few video projects in the
past, but we are talking 4 years ago when I myself was at university and it is a daunting experience for us both. We are using a trial version of Sony Vegas 9.0 Pro to put together the raw cut and we are basically learning as we go. I have learned a lot after my first day of editing, mainly:

• HD is a resource sucking bugger to edit on a mid range PC
• Storyboards are a valuable aid even on a shoe string production and in hindsight we should have developed one.
• Sony Vegas is frustrating when trying to preview cuts

• It takes a little more pepper than salt to make good scrambled eggs

So how much did it actually cost? Well it was around £18 and the break down is as follows:

• 2 Stroke motor oil to power the generator
• 8 Bottle’s of Water for Band & Crew
• 2 Subway Sandwiches for the editors

• Petrol used for transport there and back

It is now 8:43 on a fine Sunday morning in Belfast and I’m up reviewing yesterdays cut. Below are some stills from the first 80 seconds.