Jazz Dance Poster

I was asked to make a poster for an event by Helsinki Traditional Jazz Dancers. I don't know much about jazz dance but sounded fun, so I decided to do it. I hadn't done any actual hand-made lettering for a while so I thought that could be the starting point of the poster.

I first made some pencil sketches which looked all right. Then there was a break in the work and I misplaced the original sketches, so I drew more different ones, inspired by a book of Doyald Young's work that I read at a friend's place. There was still missing a certain flow that I had in mind, so I tried lettering with a Pelikan ink, the lettering instrument actually being the plastic tube that is attached to the cap of the ink bottle. This took a little practice at first, but I managed to get the hang of it quite fast anyway. This produced some nice randomness that I wanted the text to have.

I actually thought I would letter all the texts by hand but that turned out to be a bit too big job for the schedule so I settled for a font that would contrast the handmadeness. The client was very happy with the poster, as were I. Nice job. Now I need some more ink to continue. The final poster is below.

Koti6: Hollilla - music video

This is from the last spring/summer but I noticed I hadn't written about this yet so here goes. My friend asked me if I liked to make a music video for their band Koti6 (pronounced kotikutonen, meaning more or less "homemade"). They use a lot of sampling with some rapping / singing and instruments, and give a lot of room for their collaborators too. I also was pretty much free to do what I wanted with the music video, I did get some scanned reference materials but wasn't really required to use them.

I started figuring out the project with those scans but then turned to some of the more abstract video clips I had shot with my 7D. There was a lot of intentional blurriness and abstract surfaces I had shot just because I liked that kind of look. So I started testing those. One clip at a time they seemed sort of interesting but then I started layering them on top of each other which worked very well. There might be a maximum of seven layers on top of each other at the same time. What worked and what didn't was kind of intuitive, there might have been a million options equally good as the final video was.

I was aiming for some kind of semi-abstract world that would have a similar feel as some of the reference scans had, I think it worked out. The story is quite abstract too, but it moves through urban scenery, then to the forest setting and then underwater. In the beginning there's a bit of a mix of settings but the main  The video was supposed to have more graphical transitions between the parts but they turned out to be unnecessary after all.

I also learned a lot about Final Cut Pro X while working on this. I'd mostly used After Effects before, but since this was more of a pure editing job after all, it was a lot faster and comfortable to edit with FCP X. All the layering of the clips was done in FCP. All material is purely video, no generated material. Transitions and some color adjustment was used. And some retiming.

On a small record release party the Koti6 guys spoke about how they work in a kind of intuitive fashion when making music. That was kind of same as the process in the video editing too, I just didn't know it while making it. Nice coincidence in any case.

There's a new video coming for a remix version of this song later this spring.

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