NEW YORK CITY: ALIVE AT NIGHT

When we went to New York City I brought the handycam to record out holiday there. Now that I've posted those videos as a series that begins with this one I'm looking at the footage with a different perspective in mind.

I like having stock footage of New York City that I of course have total license to and I'm sure I'll be using it in ways I never anticipated in videos that I never knew I'd make ... if that's confusing think about how I feel. That came out of my head

I love cities at night. I have a lot of night time footage of Toronto but nothing specifically shot to be turned into a video. Let's put that on the list .. damn, that's a long list

The footage I shot in New York wasn't really what I would have chosen to shoot for a video that reflects that city's incredible night life. Well some of it is but I would have shot more, and different angles, and would have brought an tripod; I would have shot more detail shots, more extreme close ups that I like to use to contrast against wider shots

Still, I was happy with the footage I got. Most of it was shot at ground level in Times Square, 42nd Street and the Broadway area. Then we were up on the Empire State Building after the sun went down, some pretty strong shots I think

So I decided to cut together a little video of night time in New York City. I don't have specific plans for this video, I was at one point going to enter it into the National Geo Traveller Storyteller contest so license free music was a necessity. I chose another video for that competition but I decided to stick with my own music, just to have something on the shelf I could enter into contests

As I tend to do I layer a lot of audio here. Ambient audio is the sound associated with a shot, so when I put in a clip of people in Times Square I kept its audio. But I also have wild audio here to; wild audio being sound recorded on site but not necessarily belonging to the shot. So I have sounds of sirens and traffic from another clip that I stripe under the Times Square footage. I use pre recorded sound effects too; I have some open license studio sound effects of generic traffic etc that like to bed under the ambient and wild sound, keeping the volume low but using it as a deep background

I definitely need some new original music. I'm continuing to try to build songs in Garageband and Soundtrack Pro; they are great tools but I'm no musician. And I'm spoiled. I'm used to using songs from the best musicians in the world to cut to and use as background. May be time soon to start begging

At any rate, here is New York City: Alive at Night. Feedback is always welcome