After the cool photoshoot Mark Forman (bbluesman.com) did for me a couple of weeks ago, I quickly struck while the iron was hot and asked him to do some photos of me and Chris Bailey for the cover of Suncake Lounge Vol.1. We went to Donghai here in Taichung last Saturday, and Mark again came up with some very cool shots. Here we have the result of the photoshoot set to music from the album. Enjoy this teaser!

Browse Mark Forman’s FLICKR photostream.

I’ve just finished the video I’ve been working on for my track Freedom Zen with Chang Jui-chuan. The track is off the CABACA album (more info and download links here) which has just also become available on CD Baby for those who want to support this and possible future collaborations by buying a copy of the CD.

I wanted Jui-chuan’s lyrics to play the starring role in the video, so I “textified” CC licensed still images I found on flickr, with the help of visual keywords that Jui-chuan provided me with. I animated the images in AfterEffects, and mixed them with some blue-screen footage I shot with a Xacti CG65 camcorder. I drew some images with blue permament marker and Emily kindly wrote the traditional and simplified characters for me. To save time, I rendered some sections and backgrounds online with animoto.

There’s a link to watch the video in high quality on the song’s YouTube page. The video is also available on Vimeo and there’s a link to download the original 150MB .wmv-file.

Unfortunately I have no pics from when we recorded Chris Bailey’s guitar for Freedom Zen, but here are Chuang Tyng-Ruey’s photos from the recording session in Taipei where we recorded Jui-chuan’s vocals and Bobo on the drums.

I learned about animoto.com yesterday – someone had used one of my CC licensed tracks in their video and it looked intriguing. So, I thought I’d try my hand myself.

Here’s an unreleased track, Distant Towns, after the Animoto treatment. The images are from my trip to Sapporo to attend the iCommons Summit – most of them from Moerenuma Park.

*** UPDATE ***

The track has since been released under the title Faraway Places on the Stone Bell EP.