Alphonse Nguyen

Recently, my brother took one of the songs from my favourite musical, The Sound of Music, and wrote his own lyrics. I liked it so much that I wanted to accompany him on keyboard. It was then decided that we’d film ourselves performing this new version with a background/story that he also came up with. Thus, Sibling Rivalry Productions was born. But this production was fraught with many fun difficulties.

First, using my TASCAM DP-02, I recorded the keyboard accompaniment. Then we sang our parts individually (with Anton requiring many takes, I might add!). Once that was done, I burned the finished copy onto CD.

Second, we asked our friends to help us with the actual filming. Keith took control of the camera while Sally held up a lamp for lighting purposes. She also played our CD recording at the appropriate time so that we could hear the music and lip-sync. Lip sync to our own work? Yes, because we figured it was the best way to do things as we were limited in time and resources.

Problems started when I tried to transfer the camera data onto my laptop. I stupidly placed the SD card into its slot without the adaptor, so it got stuck! Anton and Keith kindly dismantled my laptop, and a few hours later the card was retrieved intact (the same can’t be said about my SD slot). We were a bit worried that my computer wouldn’t run properly once it was reassembled, but it seems to work fine, thank goodness.

The next challenge was in syncing up the video and audio (I had to find the correct balance between the music heard on camera from the CD player and the actual music itself). During the performance of the song, Anton and I added some extra spoken words over the music, like “Nice!” I thought that we had to re-record those words because of interference between the two sound sources, but Anton used a nice program that extracted the audio from the camera version so that I could splice it into the original recording.

It’s now almost 1 am and I should be off to bed for work tomorrow, but it was so worth it. Enjoy!

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