Joe Kranz

OK, so there’s two different videos here, and their stories are equally different.

The first is a music video I coordinated in the great lockdown of 2020. In an effort to boost morale in my colleagues, I decided to throw out a slack message in the general slack channel to see if any bored musicians out there were wanting to try a remote collaboration and cover the famed song, “Stand by Me”. Now, due to latency, there’s just no realistic way to do this in real time, so I put on my music producer hat to start this thing.

I am fortunate enough to be able to play guitar and sing, so I started with a scratch track of myself singing playing my acoustic, and input a click track (metronome) on top so others could follow along. Sent that out to those that signed up, with some suggestions on how to best record their instruments or voices with their phone or laptop, and waited to see what exactly I had gotten myself into.

I ended up receiving over 15 submissions, and they came in all different flavors… Drums, Sax, Flute, Keyboard, etc. As I started to try and work with these in Premiere Pro, it quickly became obvious that the Audio needed some love. If I couldn’t get the audio to sound good and mesh together, this would never work.

So I learned Logic Pro X, a pro sound recording/mixing/mastering tool in order to be able to manipulate the audio into a decent sounding song. And ya know, considering all but 5 of the instruments were recorded on either a phone or laptop’s onboard microphone, I’d say it turnout out pretty great!

From there I just had to figure out the video part, which I decided to do in a tiled effect. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed working on it!

The next video is lot more straightforward: a live recording of a funk band called Strange Lady, performing at Lincoln Theatre in Downtown Raleigh, NC. With 5 cameras that were implemented, I was able to capture the band fully with myself as the only videographer present.