I have had a certain video project on my photo/ video bucket list for quite some time; the creating a grid of my fellow ukulele group players all playing the same song at home or wherever.
Lockdown here in the UK spurred me on, as we are all locked down at home, unable to meet up at our usual pub (The George, Tunbridge Wells) for a jam 😞
The group, of which I am the current leader, is The Tunbridge Wells Ukulele Night Thing (TWUNT for short) We always start our jams with a rendition of Bad Moon Rising, and so it seemed logical to use that as our first virtual strum along, even if (with hindsight) the tone of the song might seem inappropriate.
It took longer to create this than I thought it would though! Firstly recording the audio track for them all to play to. I chose to add a drum track to play along to, to help everyone keep to time. I don’t play along with drums typically, so that was a learner 😁
I posted the audio with the simple instruction, “film yourselves playing along to the track in your headphones, making sure we can see and hear you”. I said they could use whatever device or app they like, and upload to a Google Drive folder. A bit of a gamble, but didn’t want to restrict folks to any specific device or format. Finding a method for people to upload from all the different devices proved tricky, but we got there with footage arriving to me on all the channels.
Once I had the footage, it was a simple case of aligning the clips, using the audio waveforms. I did notice that some videos seemed to play out of synch. Turned out it was variable frame/ bit rates, solved by transcoding to fixed.
Next step – arranging the different shaped videos into some sort of Grid. I cropped as best I could, but couldn’t simply go with a square, so had to manually create the tiled layout you see above. This took a while, as no matter where I moved them around, I always ended up with a gap. Then BOOM – I had the idea of filling the gap with the group’s logo and video title 🙂
I would do it again, but mabe specify they film themselves centrally on screen so I can crop to a square. Plus find a universal means of sharing the footage with me.
Thanks for reading… Time for you to watch the video 😁