It’s my first new post for O’Reilly’s Digital Media website:

How To Shoot Broadcast Quality Music Videos On A Camera Phone
This is a pretty neat story from beginning to end — a lesson in what can be accomplished when someone sticks to a vision and sees it through to the end. Right on to Blast Records and The Presidents of the United States of America (P.U.S.A.) for taking a chance too!
Check out the Making Of video that Grant let me host, too.

This development is more than a novelty. It’s a working demonstration of the natural artistic progression towards the integration of new mobile video technology within existing art forms.
I predict that it will soon be commonplace for bands to shoot mobile phone-based video of interviews, practices, performances, songs-in-progress, or whatever, and post it to their websites…
Mobile phone cameras can only record at 1/3000 of standard broadcast quality, and don’t capture movement very well. In addition these phones only recorded at 10 frames per second, even though the manufacturer had promised that they’d record at 15 fps.
During the shoot, the phones were so temperamental that they’d just turn off at any point without warning, so Grant had the band play the song 24 times at half speed in order to provide enough footage to edit together one good take of the song.