Hi Friends!

Do you all ever get to the end of a project and think... "why do I do this to myself?"

Ha! That's kind of what December was the entire month...

The big priority was the music video, we started making a plan about it in November, and were pretty deep into the work through most of December, and then we had to shift all of our attention to the concert on December 19th. We felt like our video was close, and so felt ok about setting it down until the concert was over. 

The prep for the concert was wonderful! For the first time we were set up 10 days before. The plan was to practice Monday through Friday, do a warm up on Saturday, and be ready to go at 8pm. I knew I wanted to do some live looping, so I had some computer programming to do. 

The plan was also to stream in my friend Ben (Medieval Media), and his daughter Logan for their own concert in the middle of our concert. I was using software called Ecamm, which is a form of broadcast software, that I specifically chose because the ability to "interview" in HD was how we were going to bring them into our stream.

On Friday, the 18th, the day before the concert, Ben and I connected on the software, and figured out that my internet was being a little weird, so we reset my router, and asked our roommate to stop gaming for a minute. That fixed the problem. We ran a couple tests to make sure our audio and video were working correctly. And everything seemed fine. 

Saturday the 19th came. 

Ben and I began connecting about an hour before the show started. He told me my audio was really choppy, and so we ran through the same steps but nothing really got better. I checked the stream health via youtube, and the it kept telling me the health was poor. I was thinking, "It's always like this before a show, it'll be ok". It wasn't... It never got better. Ben decided to run his own stream, and we checked to see if anything would get better. 

It did not. It really did not.

We told everyone watching to go to Ben and Logan's show, and would try and see what we could do. Nothing ever got better. We were heartbroken. I stayed up super late looking for some kind of solution to our problem.

I learned that Ecamm was uploading our video onto their server and then sending it to YouTube. This would normally be fine, but their servers were slow, and created a bottleneck to YouTube. Finding different software that we could use was a whole thing: 

Initially, I needed something that could bring in Ben and Logan via stream, since the initial concert failed, I didn't need to bring them in anymore. So I just needed something that was able to use my iPhone as a webcam... that's another whole thing... 

I landed on software called StreamLabs OBS, but, using my iPhone requires a camera app called NDI. NDI is not compatible with OBS directly, so, someone created a hack, allowing OBS to utilize the NDI app...It's not ideal, but after running 5ish tests directly to YouTube around 12:30am. I saw that everything should be good.

We decided to do our concert again the next day. 

The tests were great, there was a small pop here and there, but it wasn't unbearable. 

When we got into the show, there were some comments about the audio, I actively decided to just do the concert, and hope for the best.

Afterwards, I tried listening to the show. The audio was awful. Again, I was devastated. A different problem, but essentially the same problem. The audio dropping in and out. To me, it was unlistenable... 

I woke up the next day refusing to admit defeat. Refusing to let the concert that we worked so hard on die in an audio graveyard. The concert was supposed to be done on Saturday night the 19th, and it was Monday morning the 21st, and our self-set deadline for our music video was the 26th. 

Ok... 

We decided to just record the concert, and then release the songs one by one. You can listen to the YouTube playlist here.

Once all the songs were finally recorded and posted, it was immediately time to jump back into our music video (3/4 done at that point)

Why did we do this to ourselves?

In our next letter, we'll dissect the making of our music video Ark part I, which hopefully has reached you by now!

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✄ Leah and Elijah ✍︎

    Collagist ▴ Artists ▴ Composer