Nine Inch Nails have been on tour around Australia with the Soundwave festival, and their artistic director Rob Sheridan has been along for the ride, and took his Canon 5D MKII on stage at various venues.

Full HD Version from Nine Inch Nails.

Screw resolution charts and slow focus pulls on flora, this is how you test out a camera. Take it up on stage with crushing noise, blistering lights, smoke, sweat, and guitarists flailing around. The 5D has taken it all in stride. All of the videos are available for download in 1280×720. That’s a 650MB file for the above video.

Obviously Sheridan’s close collaboration with Trent and NIN has allowed him to work in a way which many artists would find intrusive. Weaving amongst the performers, and handling the manual focus with aplomb, he’s pulled off the most realistic, personal concert footage I’ve seen for a long time.

Update: Here’s a crowd view of the same performance, including Rob moving around the stage. Interesting to remind yourself how a “normal” camera deals with concert lighting.

I’m a little incredulous that I haven’t posted about La Blogotheque before. The French crew have been putting out their intimate live music podcasts or “Take Away Shows” since 2006. Their philosophy is obviously something I’m super keen on:

Every week, we invite an artist or a band to play in the streets, in a bar, a park, or even in a flat or in an elevator, and we film the whole session. Of course, what makes the beauty of it is all the little incidents, hesitations, and crazy stuff happening unexpectingly. Besides, we do not edit the videos so they look perfectly flawless, instead we keep the raw sound of the surroundings. Our goal is to try and capture instants, film the music just like it happens, without preparation, without tricks. Spontaneity is the keyword.

They’re about to film their 100th episode, and in 3 years they’ve worked with some absolutely fantastic artists, putting out work with real humanity and emotion.

The latest? Oh, just Tom Jones.

Tom Jones - Green Green Grass of Home - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Each show has lovely explanatory notes, beautiful embedded HD video from Vimeo, and they also allow high quality download of all their videos. Great for projection at parties, or a quiet night in with some great music.

American director Todd M Duym has put together a tight little multi-camera music video for Curtis Santiago.

Curtis Santiago - Annabel from Todd M Duym on Vimeo.

The edit is loads of fun. Having worked on a much simpler screen-splitting post production before, I can imagine the post on this piece may have been reasonably time-consuming. Expressions and scripting and a well organized workflow can help make this kind of thing easier, but when it comes down to it you’re moving a lot of little bits of data around.

Cheap video cameras are doing such fun things for music video.

Speaking of extra heads, I recently completed a music video - Fail With Me - with collaborator Edward Guglielmino, for the album Late At Night.

Edward Guglielmino - Fail With Me from Jaymis on Vimeo.

A continuation of the Quick, Single-Shot philosophy I espoused and we discussed 6 months ago.

I think this integration is where the future of the music industry lies. Previously the model was to save up money and art, to take it somewhere secret for a long time, then eventually release a monolithic product - an album or a live show - and hope people identify with that. I feel the future of music and video is smaller, incremental works. Gathering fans steadily, through free, easily accessible releases in whatever media and networks are available, rather than holding out for the giant fanfare of an album or tour, which has a single shot at success.

Which is why I shot the Bridge Sessions with Edward Guglielmino. We spent a couple of hours - considerably less time than I wasted last year discussing CD packaging options or album revenue shares, and created something which lets people identify what we’re doing, to become fans, and to join our journey as artists. Because it’s a piece of art, some people will love it, some will think it’s boring, or terrible. If it was an album we’d spent a year making, those latter reactions would be a tragedy, but we only spent a couple of hours, which means we have another chance to turn those people into fans next week.

Since then we have released another 5 videos. 4 of which were documenting live performance, and this one a “studio” piece, for the studio album.

This has been posted all over the web this weekend, but in case there’s anyone out there in CDM Land who hasn’t already encountered it:

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Of course, apart from being a high dose of both Cute and Funny, there’s a CDMo moral to this story as well, one which I’m trying to take to heart this year: It’s all about the content. Your techniques and tools might be impressive, but if you don’t use them to create interesting things, your audience won’t be engaged. This video is obviously result of much time and love. It’s hardly an “advanced” animation, and yet it’s probably the most inspiring piece of work I’ve seen this week.

I’m currently wrapping up a music video, which I hope embodies my new ethos of faster, more effective creation. I’m planning for 2009 to be a prolific year, both for the things I create and share for this site, and things I create for Elsewhere (which I’ll probably share here anyway).

I hope others will join me on this little voyage. 2008 was a great year for CDM tips, so don’t be shy in 2009, get in touch if there’s something out there which is inspiring you, or if you’ve done something which could inspire others.