"Caboodle"

Those of you with iPhoto know the way that it "scrubs" your picture thumbnails when you move your mouse over them. When I accidentally scrubbed the 106 pictures from the "Jewel Thief" photoshoot I thought...hey! That looks sort of fun! I'll make a movie!

So here you go: an entire photoshoot in twenty seconds.



The Making Of

This was surprisingly hard to create music for. Since "Koyaanisqatsi" taught us that all fast-moving imagery must be accompanied by Philip Glass-style music, I decided that a quick arpeggio was required, one note for every picture.

In addition, VanillaJ said to me a few weeks ago, "Have you ever noticed that all the arty/experimental videos are depressing?" So I wanted to make a HAPPY song.

The problem was the part near the end, when each picture lasts twice as long for a very brief period. That happened because there were two versions of each picture in that section: one with the hole in my fishnets, and the other with the hole Photoshopped by Jenn (look at my left thigh for the subtle evidence).

It was a happy accident but it made no musical sense; it threw the time signature right out the window. I had to learn how to use Logic Pro's signature editor to fudge it so that -- at the end of the double-picture portion -- we'd land at the beginning of another 4/4 bar.

I spent a week on that, simply so I could get the drum pattern to match up. Then I decided it sounded better if the drum pattern didn't return anyway.

Anyway, this was just a fun experiment and it turned out pretty nicely.

"Boxcar"

Another odd little video that I finally finished this morning: "Boxcar."



What do you do when your neighbour parks his junker car on your front lawn? You turn it into a constructive project.

I took my camera and tripod and filmed every piece of the car that I considered to be interesting. Since the horizon was rarely level with the car itself, I made a decision to always orient the camera based on the car's surfaces, which I think was a mistake: it causes the surrounding surfaces (roads, hedges, etc.) to appear skewed in a distracting sort of way.

Eventually I got the hang of avoiding reflections, and I also realized that late-afternoon light is very pretty when it bounces off metal.

My original idea was to mix the video clips with painstakingly hand-edited stills of the car, to make it look like a cartoon in the midst of a live landscape. Then I decided that it was a "too-tricky-clever" idea without any real point.

And since I was reading Iain Sinclair's "Lights Out for the Territory," I found myself getting more interested in the style of a film he frequently wrote about: "London" by Patrick Keiller. I hadn't seen the film at the time, but Sinclair's description of droll narration, motionless camera, and no-nonsense cuts was subconsciously inspiring...I was also thinking about Peter Greenaway's "The Falls." By referencing objects in the clips themselves, I wrote a little story and tried to find images that reflected the mood (rather than the content) of the clips.

I intercut with black frames to break the monotony of the images, and I threw a deliberately glitchy shot into the middle for the same reason. The background sounds are the ones from the clips themselves, with rougher sounds (like busses) removed and lots of denoising to compensate for my camera's crappy mic.

I hope you like it!

Lightbox

Another experimental music video of my own construction: "Lightbox."



The Background

This time the audio came first. I had the idea of taking a sound source, splitting it up into five different frequencies, and applying a different type of tremolo to each frequency. The source I tried was a modified Hammond organ soft-synth, playing a rising series of barely-musical chords. That's the basis for the track.

Then I realized the bass was underrepresented so I added a single-note bassline (not an electric bass sadly, but another software synth). Up next was the "ting" of a pot handle being whacked with a spoon.

Once I'd gotten that far I tried to think of what it reminded me of, and ran down my ever-growing list of "box" words. Lo and behold: "Lightbox!" It was sharp, clean, shifting, meditative...

...but where to find the visuals? Lying in my bed on a Sunday morning and filming the odd pinhole camera effect of light coming through tiny slits in the curtains, filtered through blowing tree leaves. Those images aren't manipulated except for tiny tweaks in brightness and contrast; otherwise, that's the sort of thing I wake up to in the morning.

I tried filming the reflective lights of passing cars -- the phantoms that my cat chases at night -- but they didn't show up very well, and I'd pretty much decided to stay with stationary light only. Then I shot a few images of daylight around a chair and on my ceiling, and I had all the footage I needed.

Back to the music again. I sent the same, slowed-down chords through Logic's "Sculpture" instrument, which emulates the behaviour of various objects interacting with other objects...in this case, a really crazy bow being drawn across wood. I played a few descending notes on the ESQ-1 to finish it all off, and voila.

I like it. It's pretty, in a strange sort of way. It really does capture the feeling of laying in bed and watching the lights. Not much happens or changes during the song -- I took out the few stimulating samples and beats that I'd experimented with early on -- but I don't think anything SHOULD happen. It's just a lazy contemplation. It's meant to make you snooze.

Phonebox/Lunchbox

Rather than exclusively filming mini-drag shows -- which are rife with copyright infringement -- or silly sketches -- which have a whole bunch of tiresome and restrictive requirements -- I decided to make a music video. But I wanted the video and the music to evolve TOGETHER, instead of filming footage for a song I've already done.

So I filmed some footage and moved it back and forth between iMovie and Logic Studio, massaging both the video and music until...

"Phonebox/Lunchbox," the first in a projected series of "box" video-songs.



The Background

This is all part of an attempt to broaden my horizons, and in particular to learn new skills. I figured that this project would require me to research and explore a lot of things outside of my comfort zone: concept, composition, and actually trying to ACHIEVE something instead of just letting it happen.

Remember when I got all gushy about the video stabilization feature in iMovie '09? Well it has a pretty serious bug: if you choose to stabilize your trimmed clips in the editor window (instead of stabilizing the pre-trimmed clips in the event window), and then you decide later on to change the trimming for the clips, iMovie tends to misapply the stabilization settings and it will not let you override them. Even deleting the video entirely from the project and then re-importing it will not help...iMovie never forgets.

So if you noticed the three or four jittery clips in that video, I'm afraid that there was nothing I could do: iMovie would not let me choose a stabilization value above 101%. I have learned my lesson.

Most of the phone and wire footage was filmed on a beautifully cloudy, ominous morning. The park footage was filmed that sunny afternoon. I'm totally aware that many of the things I filmed are NOT telephone-related, but heck, I'm no technician!

As for the telephone voices, I have been collecting those for years, and this project was in many ways born from a desire to finally USE some of them.