Scottish D.I.Y - Palace of Crust

I have, as far back as I can remember, been obsessed with documentaries. I would imagine my obsession began with watching nature documentaries on the BBC as a young child. Later on that would change to watching films about bands I liked, I loved how a documentary wasn't a piece of art by the band, like a album or music video, but it revealed to you WHY their personalities drew them to make the album of video the way it was. I believe art and music should be an extension of the self and an expression of the way the artist feels. So when I really truly love a work of art, I feel like I, to a certain extent can imagine what the artist is like. A documentary gives you the opportunity to firstly see if that assumption was right and furthermore can illuminate things about the work you hadn't considered or reveal things about the artist you never would have imagined, and best of all, in their words.

In my final year of University I was living in a house with some friends that I was in a band with, we used to host gigs in our livingroom for free. The whole way through uni I been doing 3D modelling projects as this was what I had always wanted to do when I finished, but I was having some serious trouble with my project this year and was desperate from a break from it.

My housemate suggested that at the next gig we hosted, I should rent some cameras out from uni and film it, then upload it to the internet so the bands could use it to promote themselves. I thought this was a great idea, then suggested we could do interviews and before long I had decided to make it a full blown project.

Of course the only problem was that I had literally never done anything like this before and had no idea what I was doing. Because the jargon and tech stats ment absolutely nothing to me I ended up using a DV camera but also recruiting one of my friends at uni who had a Mark 2 Canon, as you can imagine the footage didn't exactly match up.

The first edit that I came up with was surprisingly well received. And was featured on some music blogs with good reviews. It also got 1000 views in a week, which I never would have expected.

 However after not very long I decided it had to be redone as, for lack of a better term, it was crap. The main issue was it was just way too long, and if you weren't already into punk music, you would never want to watch a band play a whole song, let alone two. Now these thousand views I got just embaress me and I wish I had waited to release it to the public.

Here is the first edit, if you want to watch it but..... please don't.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46jL7i_G5bA

My second edit edit, needed a refined structure and some creation of context for people that weren't into punk and who didnt understand the idea of D.I.Y culture. I shorted down the performances drastically and wrote out a monologue to go over the intro which outlined the ideals of D.I.Y.

Obviously I wish I could go back and redo this now, but it was a massive learning experience as I did almost everything I could wrong. But here it is!