Debut of The Moon
Thanks to everyone who came out to check out our performance at Franklin Street Works last Thursday. We had so much fun performing and sharing our music and visuals with you. Special thanks to Franklin Street Works for hosting us and our friends! Please friend us on The Moon’s facebook page to learn about upcoming events.
For those of you who couldn’t make it out, check out this video taken by Franklin Street Works. This was one of our instrumentals called “Olive”. The photo above was taken by Jackie Alcayaga.
Here is a little backstory on how it all came together. Jeff and I worked every night in the studio, last week, to get our set just right.
He was still finishing lyrics to his new songs, and I was choreographing visual clips that would enhance the mood and fit the pace. We settled on 8 songs including 1 cover song that we did as a duet together to end the performance. The duet we covered was, True Love Will Find You in the End by Daniel Johnston. I’ve always loved his original version and Beck’s cover. (Check out those links to hear the different versions.)
Daniel Johnston is particularly special to us because when Jeff and I went on our first date, we went to the Highline Ballroom to see Daniel perform. We had both seen The Devil & Daniel Johnston documentary and were completely hooked on his music. It seemed like the perfect song for our duet considering that this was the first time I have ever sung in front of a live audience! (Which I loved, and will do again.)
My visual footage for the performance came from a variety of different sources from my VJ library that I’ve been collecting over the last 3 years. Additionally, a good deal of footage came from two special trips I took this year. The first being from California when we spontaneously went hot-air-ballooning at sunrise over wine country and the other at the Shedd aquarium in Chicago. I hope to incorporate more and more travel footage into my shows as we continue to build our performance.
At the studio, I also shot some footage of Jeff playing guitar on green screen with the hopes of masking some animated visuals into his silhouette. While the end result was very cool, it never made it into the final performance. Maybe next time!
I kept coming up with tons of last minute details that I wanted to add to our show, and one of them was for both of us to wear all white clothing. When we were in front of the visuals they would just melt through us and blend into the walls. I think the effect worked well to really enhance the projections in the space. The hardest part was actually finding white clothing this time of year. Thankfully Goodwill and my thrift-shop-hunting skills was a success. Perhaps in the future we can find a way to make all of our equipment white. I think it would create a really exciting environment for visuals in all the subtle details.
The space we were setting up at Franklin Street Works was an intimate room on their lower level. It was a little challenging from a setup perspective because of it’s size, mirrors, door and wall indentations. We had no way of hanging projectors to the ceiling like we usually do. However we were able to jimmy-rig a setup using speaker stands and clamp mounts and were able to hook up 2 projectors skewed towards the two main walls, and one angled towards the ceiling. A white sheet and a couple pillowcases did the trick to hide the window & mirrors. Unfortunately the VJ software that I’m using currently doesn’t allow me to skew the video angles to be perfect when the projectors are set up on an angle, so I ended up changing my set towards using more abstract imagery in the end result. This ended up working out really well in my opinion and gave the illusion of changing the shape of the walls around us.
- Before we set up at FSW
- After we setup at FSW. Photo by Heather Elizabeth Photography
Everyone packed into the space at 6pm and we had a great time talking to everyone, and connecting with new and old friends. Thanks again to everyone who made the night special for us and for collecting videos & photos. We hope to make another performance happen again soon!
Please check out our new site: themoonmusic.com for more in the near future.
