Rockin' On-Stage Videos with Continuum and Sapphire

I’ve done a lot of cool things in my career as a film & TV editor, but making videos for Motion City Soundtrack has been a definitive highlight. They’ve been my favorite band for decades now, so when they approached me to create on-stage assets for the 20th anniversary tour of their seminal record “I Am The Movie”, I couldn’t say ‘yeah!’ fast enough.

I immediately had so many ideas of things I could put on screen to reflect the energy and emotions I feel when I listen to their music and hopefully augment the experience for their fans.

The thing is, their schedule was tight and left no room to be a perfectionist. I had a lot of VFX, textures, effects and ideas I wanted to experiment with yet had no time to build them myself. Thankfully, with the help of Boris FX plugins Sapphire and Continuum, I was able to quickly put what was in my head on screen and on stage — and in many cases make it even better than I initially had in mind.

Motion City Soundtrack

"Andy Young is the most talented human I know. His editing skills rival no other, and I cannot believe I get to call him my friend," says lead singer Justin Pierre. "Unfortunately, all the messages I’ve been receiving from fans on this tour aren’t about my amazing singing abilities and phenomenal dance moves. Instead they just want to talk about the video screens."

Film Looks

Their show opens with old footage of the band while they were recording the album and touring back in 2003. DV tape generally maxes out at 480p if you’re lucky, which isn’t gonna look great on giant screens (especially for when I wanted to punch in). I knew I wanted to use a 16mm grain to soften the pixels while maintaining a nostalgic aesthetic, but I worried an overlay loop would get repetitive and stale. So depending on the moment, I would use BCC+ Film Stocks or S_FilmDamage to achieve whatever look I wanted — as well as making frequent use of the transition — versions of said effects to splice between moments.

Motion City Soundtrack "Back to the Beat"

To accompany the lighting team’s cues on different songs, I often paired these film looks with some of the many color options available (my personal favorite was BCC+ Color Gradient).

Before & After: BCC+ Film Stocks and BCC+ Color Gradient

Camera Shakes

I always love the chaos of well-placed camera shakes. With the BCC+ Camera Shake, I could find and manipulate the presets I liked or start from scratch and create something insane.

BCC+ Camera shake interface

A favorite trick of mine is setting keyframes so the shake chaotically ramps up right before we crash into a moment (like I did with their opening track "Cambridge"). It's also great that Continuum has a Beat Reactor setting that interprets the song and automatically quantizes to it so you can make it feel like the music is what’s shaping the image.

Motion City Soundtrack "Cambridge"

Spray Paint, Cartoon & Prism

There are SO many fun textures and art styles I experimented with throughout the show, but for the song LG FUAD I quickly fell in love with the tactile BCC Spray Paint Noise and S_Cartoon Paint effects. And with keyframes on the seed generator setting I could set the grain in motion and add some style to make even a stock image look dynamic.

Before & After: BCC Spray Paint Noise and S_Cartoon Paint

I also had fun with the BCC Prism effects, playing with refracted light to distort and make overlays more alive and dynamic.

Before & After: BCC Prism

Squiggle Vision

I’ve always loved the frenetic jitter of ‘squigglevision’ (think Dr.Katz or home movies). It’s an electric aesthetic and always makes me think of the band. There’s no one preset to create this, so what I did is add BCC Turbulence (which warps the image) and BCC Posterize Time (which jitters and delays the image). I generally set posterization at 8 frames and — again — set keyframes on the random seed of turbulence so it would continuously warp the image.

Motion City Soundtrack "L.G. FUAD"

Various looks created using Continuum and Sapphire + editor Andy Young & lead singer Justin Pierre

It’s been such a treat to see my favorite band play my favorite record alongside videos I made, and I hope the work I got to do resonated with fellow die-hard MCS fans.

Motion City Soundtrack

(Special thanks to the band, and to Shane Nelson, who made the other half of the stage videos. All live images are used with permission from Kay Dargen. For more work by Andy Young, visit AndyYoungFilm.com)

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