This month marks the publication of my first work in Metal Hammer magazine. The UK metal publishing sphere is small and professionally incestuous, meaning a few staffers there have been aware of my work for some time. One review from 2011 in particular convinced them that I was worth recruiting, and that was that.

Metal Hammer is the biggest-selling monthly magazine about heavy metal published in the UK, and by extension is one of the best-selling monthlies on the genre anywhere in the world. As such, I’m obviously delighted to be able to call myself a contributor. Issue #227 is on sale now, and contains interviews by me with Sick Of It All, The Painted Smiles, and Sam Dunn, the filmmaker behind Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey.

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This video differed from previous briefs insofar as rather than editing together footage shot for a specific purpose, it was a mash-up of pre-existing footage, re-appropriated to match a song. Given that the song is called ‘DeLorean’ and the lyrics reference “Doc Brown”, it should be pretty obvious what that source material is.

For the most part, I chose to stick to taking clips from the first two Back To The Future films. They share enough visual tones that mixing and matching them was relatively easy – I made the call fairly early on in the editing process to exclude the third film from my source material as the Old West palate would visually contrast too much with the rest of the footage. For some of the close-ups of various machinery, I took clips from Spike TV’s 2010 recreation of the original teaser trailer. The only shot I used from the original version of the teaser trailer was the cut to Michael J Fox wearing sunglasses – while the quality of the 2010 re-shoot was higher and would better match the rest of the footage I was using in that regard, using footage of the actor from today wouldn’t work in context with his mid/lates 1980s self in the rest of the edit.

Although my use of it is fairly low key until right at the end, I’m particularly pleased with some of the image masking I’ve used in this video – combined with push wipes at less obvious angles, it creates a really eye-catching effect. It’s definitely a technique I plan on refining and using in future video projects. It was inspired in part by the video to ‘Reaching Out’ by Nero, although I tried to keep it more subdued in this video. While Nero’s video is intended as a pastiche of the Miami Vice credit sequence, here I was aiming for an edit that was rawer and a bit less glossy.

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This is another video I’ve edited together for Warner Bros. Records, this time for a new singer-songwriter double-act on their books, Lilygreen & Maguire. It’s a bit of a shame that the client chose to desaturate my cut and go for a black and white look, as the two cuts I submitted highlighted some of my best choice colour correction work to date.

The original footage was shot simultaneously on two different cameras, and the resulting footage required significant post-production tinkering in order to match up the two tones. The fixed-camera wide shots had a naturally warm, orange tone to them, whereas the roving close-ups had a paler, blue-green tinge to them. I provided cuts for each of these two wildly-different tones – hopefully I’ll be able to post some clips from both of these so you can see what I’m talking about.

One of the other challenges of this brief was editing footage from live performances to match a pre-recorded studio recording of the same song. This require careful time-distortion to ensure the visuals matched up with the audio, as well as co-ordinating clips taken from several performances so as to appear as just a single take.

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This is the third piece of video editing I’ve done for Warner Bros. Records – this time for the double-platinum selling Jason Derülo. The brief was to edit together an instructional video for the dance routine used in his video for ‘Don’t Want To Go Home’ (click here to check out the video), which was to form the basis for a promotional competition. This was a 2-camera shoot, with around 30 final rushes totalling around 90 minutes of footage. The final edit required this to be edited down into as short an instructional as possible, while retaining all the necessary details for the entire dance routine.

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This is another Behind The Scenes video I edited together for Warner Bros. Records. This was a particularly challenging brief – all the footage had been shot by the band and their team during a video shoot for their single ‘Overtime (ft. Ghetts)’ (click here if you want to see the video) on a cheap camera. This meant that not only was there was a mountain of footage to wade through, but significant amounts of footage were unfortunately not up to the standards required by the client. Similarly, some of the source footage was withdrawn by the client late in the editing process as they felt it did not provide an accurate portrayal Clement Marfo & The Frontline.

(Please not: the black & white finish to the video was applied by the label after I had submitted my final edit.)

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First thing’s first – I didn’t shoot any of the footage in this video, but I did edit it all together. Warner Bros. Records shot a shedload of behind-the-scenes footage on the video shoot to DEVolution’s ‘Good Love’ (click here if you’re desperate to see the original), and commissioned me to edit it together to fit Dodge & Fuski’s dubstep remix of the same track.

Looks simple enough, right? Well, simple until you realise that the pace and tempo of the dubstep remix is totally different to that of the original, resulting of hours and hours of tinkering about with dozens of split-second clips, making numerous micro-adjustments to the speed of said clips in every direction going, and more quick cuts than I dare think about. And no, after spending 8 hours listening to the same track over and over and over again, I still can’t get this song out of my head.

You can check out the rest of the videos after the jump.

These are, of course, just the videos where I was in front of the camera lens – there are just as many with me behind the camera. Click here to check out every video Thrash Hits shot over the course of the weekend.

On location in Islington

Last year in December I recorded behind-the-scenes footage during the promo shoot for Architects‘ latest single, ‘Learn To Live’. This video was released earlier this week as an exclusive on Kerrang.com.

You can check out the full behind-the-scenes clip after the jump.

All footage for the behind-the-scenes video was shot on a Sony EX-1. The final video for ‘Learn To Live’ was directed by Stuart Birchall from You Know.

Seeing as I’ve been writing for Terrorizer for three months now, now’s as good a time as any to announce that I’ve started freelancing for them. It’s been a bloody long time since the last time anything I wrote was seen in print (the ongoing success of Thrash Hits has been the principal issue there), so obviously this is A Very Good Thing Indeed.

If you don’t know what Terrorizer is, well, that’s what search engines are for. Terrorizer is one of the longest-running (and certainly one of the most well-respected) magazines covering extreme music published anywhere in the world today. And quite rightly, I’m delighted to have the opportunity to contribute.

Issue #206 is on sale now, and contains reviews from me on the new Earth album, Lazarus A.D’s second full-length, some words on the latest work of Nordic miserablism from Dark The Suns, and a short (though not sweet) piece on HookahTheFuzz.

If for some reason you’ve clicked after the jump, I can only assume you’re actually interested in what else I’ve done for Terrorizer so far. Here’s the breakdown:

Issue #205: Album reviews of Triumvirate by Black Anvil album review, Power of Horror by Haust, Call of Avernus by Alunah, Obelisk by The Engines of Armageddon. Contributions to Damnation Festival 2011 report. Live review of Black Breath, Hang The Bastard, and 33 at the London Borderline.

Issue #204: Album review of The Divide Between Chaos And Order by Arceye.

Thrash Hits Presents no.1