Another loverly clip that you can see on THE BIG SCREEN this Saturday night at the La Belle is “Guitar Pick In My Kool Aid” by The Concept, Mike Withrow, Dave Cantrell, and Ross Anderson. 

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/gfHN3T9hvY8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

One of the area’s hottest punk bands, The Concept put on a hugely fun show and if you get a chance, you ought to go see them. You can see them at Desoto’s in Beckley Thursday night, and if for some reason you find yourself in Huntington and unable to catch the RFC retrospective at the La Belle this Saturday, you can go hear The Concept at Marley’s Doghouse, where you can request that they not only play the songs they performed on Radio Free Charleston, but the songs that every other band played on the show as well.  They won’t play them, but you can request them. 

The story behind the production of this video was a little complicated.  We’d brought The Concept in for our first Halloween show in 2006, and we also recorded a couple of extra tunes to use later.  However, LiveMix Studio suffered a tragic hard drive crash that wiped out the audio tracks we’d recorded, so I had the video footage, but we lost the digital multi-tracked audio.  The camera audio was unusable because the band was so loud.  You couldn’t hear the vocals at all. 

Luckily, the band had recorded a demo of “Guitar Pick” which I was able to swipe off of their MySpace page.  A few months after the hard drive crash, I looked at the footage, and tried to sync it up with the demo.  It wasn’t even close.  I was able to do a rough cut by slicing up the video and speeding it up and slowing it down in different places so that it was close to being synchronized with the song. 

Even after doing that, it still looked choppy and goofy, and there were places where I couldn’t get Mike’s mouth to come close to lining up with the words.  Then I got the idea to do a couple of things to obscure the video’s shortcomings.  I set the video inside a giant pitcher of blue Kool Aid and made it all blue and wiggly, then I used hyper-expensive special effects–the kind they do at Lucasfilm–to superimpose a guitar pick that seemed to be “floating” around the action.  It also came in handy for covering up Mike’s mouth when the lip-sync was really far off. 

The end result was pretty darned nifty, if I do say so myself.  Check PopCult tomorrow morning for yet another classic video from the show, and check back later this afternoon for a montage of Bridget Lancaster, co-host of “America’s Test Kitchen” on PBS, back in her days as a jingle singer and improv partner on the radio version of Radio Free Charleston.