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Subject: Info about the Rockstar video ( 1 of 7 )
Posted by Douglas Adams

Several people have asked me about the Rockstar video, so here’s some info about it.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can find it on Apple’s AppleMaster site here, along with videos by John Cleese, Michael Nesmith, Greg Hines, Sinbad, etc.

In November Apple brought together a bunch of people under its AppleMaster program and taught us to use their new digital video editing stuff – the new iMac DV with Firewire ports and bundled iMovie software. (It’s a very simple-to-use program that works like a cut and paste word processor for digital video at broadcast quality. It’s pretty amazing stuff.)

We each had to made our own video as part of the class. I made a kind of rock video, based on a song by my friend Margo Buchanan. Margo is a singer and songwriter who mostly works as a session singer but has one of the most amazing voices I know. She wrote it along with Miles Waters and her husband Wix. Wix is a very old friend of mine who had the same piano teacher as me at school, but it worked rather better for him than for me, and he was for years Paul McCartney’s keyboard player. He also did the music for Starship Titanic. The guitarist on the track is the great Robbie McIntosh. Buy his acoustic album here!

The little girl in the video is my daughter, Polly, who's five. She's 'playing' a guitar of mine, a left-handed Steinberger (though she's right-handed), which has a tiny body but full-size strings and fretboard. I filmed it partly at our house in Santa Barbara, partly at Santa Barbara zoo, and the little insert with John Cleese I did in the lobby of the Apple building where we were editing.

Getting the actual shots was a very rough and ready process – it was just a question of filming whatever I could at the moments she felt like being co-operative! There was no chance of redoing anything to fix the lighting. I just got what I got and then had to do a ton of editing. Having seen it fifty times I now want to edit it further. Maybe I will sometime over the holidays.
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