Daft Punk’s “Something About Us” on Nintendo DS Ubisoft Jam Sessions, Midi controlled software electric bass, drums, synth, vocoded vocals, and solo theremin, recorded in a single pass, with a single camera

Music


Sweet tunes for a Saturday jam… by Randy George, filmed by Nicolas Bates via Waxy.

Ableton Live looped cover of Something About Us by Daft Punk, performed on Nintendo DS Ubisoft Jam Sessions, Midi controlled software electric bass, drums, synth, vocoded vocals, and solo theremin, recorded in a single pass, with a single camera.

About the helmet: It was made of papier-mâché with a custom LED visor built in … post production! using Softimage XSI and Adobe After Effects! Yes, it was a visual effect! 3D modeling, manual rotoscoping, and motion tracking/motion stabilization tricks were employed to pull this off. A LED array with animated text was projected on to a manually rotoscoped 3D visor, that was subsequently composited with the original footage using motion trackers in After Effects. The helmet itself took three days to make. I used 7 layers of card stock/normal stock paper strips in a special heavy mix paste recipe. The shape was built around a custom mold of shipping foam and gaffers tape. It was finished off with gunmetal grey paint. The visor was made of plastic cut from a microwave oven splash cover I found at Target for 5 dollars, laminated on both sides with Limo dark auto window tinting. I could see out, but the translucent plastic from the microwave splash cover along with the heavy tinting made it a little bit difficult. On the inside, the helmet was padded with custom cut felt blocks to fit my head size perfectly. The total weight was around 0.5 Kg (about 1 pound).

14 thoughts on “Daft Punk’s “Something About Us” on Nintendo DS Ubisoft Jam Sessions, Midi controlled software electric bass, drums, synth, vocoded vocals, and solo theremin, recorded in a single pass, with a single camera

  1. Snowstone says:

    Whats that last instrument he uses? I would love to have one of those. Anyone knows what it is and where to get one?

  2. Seth says:

    The last instrument was the theremin

  3. Seth says:

    There was a weekend project for this:

  4. Anonymous says:

    And a masterful job on the theremin. Could hardly believe it was “live” till I saw Randy’s site.

  5. Anonymous says:

    great work on the theremin! i’m an electronic music producer and it’s always nice to see a theremin performance :) cheers! great job on the cover as well. i dig that song :)

  6. Jeroen says:

    That’s just too awesome! But I wonder why the date shown at the end is three days in october 2008?

  7. Endif says:

    Awesome work by the video poster. Super well done.

    But given that it’s DaftPunk, who are notorious for raping other artists work for sampled phrases to provide ‘their’ hooks and melodies, shouldn’t this be referred to as a cover of their remix?

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