♪♪
-A bit more orangey
♪♪
-I'm Cody Kilpatrick.
And I'm Austin Smith.
And we are Digital Velvet.
-He's going to have his guitar that's taking up this space
that extends him out a little and the further off.
- Known each other for about six or seven years.
Worked on a couple different projects,
filming like talking head videos, some like kids content,
and then periodically a couple music performance type things.
And then both, let's see, got laid off on the
same round of layoffs.
And then we're like, well, we've been
doing this together for the last couple of years.
Let's just keep that train rolling and do it for ourselves.
-Striking overhead.
♪♪
-Got to get that pro looking like a microphone.
-So at the end of 2024, we were putting together
the brand Digital Velvet, and we're like, how do we
make an impact and get people to find out about us?
that's not just a like boring Instagram video.
♪ I can hear the sound through the walls ♪
-And so we decided to come up with this like crazy concept
of doing live performance videos for like every
weekday in January from iconic Seattle
locations around the city.
And it was an insanely challenging project.
There were some days where we were filming a band,
and I was literally in the back editing the video
that was supposed to go up later that day and posting it.
♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪
♪ Not talking about no ordinary night up on the town ♪
- We love the Seattle music scene,
and we've taken a pretty huge portion of our identity
into serving that community and trying to make sure
that they have the ability to get their art seen in a
way that's really impactful.
♪ ♪
♪ Moving alone, a heart with no home ♪
♪ She wants to... ♪
-I remember one conversation down in the basement
of this building and just being like, "Hey,
this is insane.
We've never done anything like this."
But if at the end of the shoot we learn something from
this process, great shoot.
Forget about how the angles look, what all that
stuff. We should just make sure that we walk away
from this shoot learning something.
Let's like add a new skill set, let's
add some new piece of gear that we wanted to focus
on and just make sure that we understand it better
or whatever and just prioritize doing that
every time.
And so that attitude that we both
like, "Oh actually that's a great idea to make this
thing livable."
That has translated into pretty
much all of our shoots now that if it bombs, find out why.
If it hits, find out why.
If we wanted to try something, don't hold back and wait.
Find the first opportunity to try
and educate yourself on that process
and let that kind of dictate the types of projects
you take on or the type of shape that a project takes.
♪ As I lay up questioning ♪
- We're both massive gear nerds as much as we are music nerds,
which is a great combo right now.
There's a lot of really fun technology
for both working with musicians and music in general,
but then also filmmaking obviously
is having a really fun technological boom.
- Sippin' on you, sippin' on me.
Swing, set, view.
Quarter past three.
- Two, three, and look.
We use a lot of motion in our videos
where we kind of strategized building out our
entire gear closet around how can we be
as flexible as possible and how can we be the
fastest notes responsive to the music as possible.
So we want it to feel immersive as a viewer
to feel like you're experiencing that music
for the first time or that performance for the first time
the same way that we are behind the camera.
That really requires us to have things
like stabilization in play, a good option of lenses.
- I'm feeling pretty good in terms of our angles.
We're obviously gonna need to discover some things
as we go on this one.
- I don't wanna do work that I think is boring.
Like I wanna do fun projects.
I wanna push myself.
And so we're gonna keep working and doing
probably more and more ambitious things as we go.
♪ ♪