Aside from uploading pictures to my flickr account over the last year, I've been also shooting some video footage in the hopes of creating some movies or music clips. I had already started looking around for ideas on editing software when an online friend of mine pointed out that I already have some rudimentary capabilities handy in the form of Windows Movie Maker.
That very day, I spent an afternoon editing together a "video" for the Pink Floyd song "Terminal Frost" out of some stills and footage I had sitting around. The point of this first exercise (and the chief reason I have deleted it from my YouTube channel listing) was more about getting a feel for the program and starting to get ideas of how I wanted my work to look than making something I was proud of.
One thing I learned straightaway from the "Terminal Frost" clip: if you really want to take the viewer on a virtual journey into the imagination, the first thing you need to do is blot out all recognizable logos, brand names, storefronts, modern vehicles ... any overt symbols of commercialism. This might be overly sensitive on my part, perhaps, but I find that any kind of product placement (inadvertent or otherwise) in videos like this immediately "pulls you out of the dream," if you will, and ruins the intended mood.
Another thing learned over the last few weeks: the only way to shoot snowfall at nighttime with a consumer-grade digital camera is to park yourself directly below a streetlamp and then shoot at an angle up and away from the source of light (all the while keeping its glow away from your field of view). I have tried just about every other way possible to get a decent image of midnight snowfall with hardly any usable results until I stumbled across this method during a particularly nasty squall.
With these learning experiences in mind, I spent last night cobbling together some better quality footage I'd taken over the last few weeks. After a few hours of work, I uploaded a video for another Floyd song called "Sorrow" that I am far more happy with and have linked below this paragraph. While there are still some amateurish bits and a couple of stills that could have been sequenced better, the overall feel of this piece is far more dark and menacing than my first experiment, which is exactly what I had been aiming for.
Watching this clip now with a bit of separation from the editing process, I am pleased with the ambient effect of the snow falling endlessly over the extended guitar solo that ends the song, a tad disenchanted with some of the shaky motion shots, and, most unexpectedly, weirdly transfixed by the low angle procession of sodium lights. Apparently, in a kind of unconscious revisitation of childhood memories, I filmed these lights from the POV I often had from the rear of the family van, lying flat on my back on a hide-a-bed that we often napped on during long trips. During the daytime hours, I could read paperbacks without getting motion sick by lying on my side (so I couldn't see the landscape whizzing on by), but after the sunset, there was little we could do but simply lie down and watch the endless parade of colored lights go by until we finally reached our destination.
"Sorrow" also gives a stylistic tip of the hat to Matt Mahurin, director of numerous rock videos of a uniquely murky stripe for such acts as Alice In Chains ("No Excuses"), U2 ("Love Is Blindness"), Tracy Chapman ("Fast Car"), R.E.M. ("Orange Crush"), Metallica ("The Unforgiven"), and the absolutely brilliant video for Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street," which remains one of my all-time favorite examples of the form. The steady, beautiful progression of half-lit, half-seen imagery in this film knocked my socks off when I first viewed it as a teenager, and as you can see below, the clip remains just as striking and powerful now as it was back in 1987.
Now that is what a music video should be like.
For a lark, I am going to be making a couple more wintry Pink Floyd video clips before moving on. Almost since the time of its release, the second side of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason strikes me as particularly wintry kind of record, and I'm looking to sew together imagery that effectively demonstrates this association for others. What I want to create here are clips that create and sustain a mood that compliments the music, working in a similar fashion as the films used by Pink Floyd during their concerts. There will be no narratives, just a simulated immersion into the frigid, lonely twilight depths of winter ( minus of course the frozen extremities).
Next up for editing: "Yet Another Movie."
That very day, I spent an afternoon editing together a "video" for the Pink Floyd song "Terminal Frost" out of some stills and footage I had sitting around. The point of this first exercise (and the chief reason I have deleted it from my YouTube channel listing) was more about getting a feel for the program and starting to get ideas of how I wanted my work to look than making something I was proud of.
One thing I learned straightaway from the "Terminal Frost" clip: if you really want to take the viewer on a virtual journey into the imagination, the first thing you need to do is blot out all recognizable logos, brand names, storefronts, modern vehicles ... any overt symbols of commercialism. This might be overly sensitive on my part, perhaps, but I find that any kind of product placement (inadvertent or otherwise) in videos like this immediately "pulls you out of the dream," if you will, and ruins the intended mood.
Another thing learned over the last few weeks: the only way to shoot snowfall at nighttime with a consumer-grade digital camera is to park yourself directly below a streetlamp and then shoot at an angle up and away from the source of light (all the while keeping its glow away from your field of view). I have tried just about every other way possible to get a decent image of midnight snowfall with hardly any usable results until I stumbled across this method during a particularly nasty squall.
With these learning experiences in mind, I spent last night cobbling together some better quality footage I'd taken over the last few weeks. After a few hours of work, I uploaded a video for another Floyd song called "Sorrow" that I am far more happy with and have linked below this paragraph. While there are still some amateurish bits and a couple of stills that could have been sequenced better, the overall feel of this piece is far more dark and menacing than my first experiment, which is exactly what I had been aiming for.
Watching this clip now with a bit of separation from the editing process, I am pleased with the ambient effect of the snow falling endlessly over the extended guitar solo that ends the song, a tad disenchanted with some of the shaky motion shots, and, most unexpectedly, weirdly transfixed by the low angle procession of sodium lights. Apparently, in a kind of unconscious revisitation of childhood memories, I filmed these lights from the POV I often had from the rear of the family van, lying flat on my back on a hide-a-bed that we often napped on during long trips. During the daytime hours, I could read paperbacks without getting motion sick by lying on my side (so I couldn't see the landscape whizzing on by), but after the sunset, there was little we could do but simply lie down and watch the endless parade of colored lights go by until we finally reached our destination.
"Sorrow" also gives a stylistic tip of the hat to Matt Mahurin, director of numerous rock videos of a uniquely murky stripe for such acts as Alice In Chains ("No Excuses"), U2 ("Love Is Blindness"), Tracy Chapman ("Fast Car"), R.E.M. ("Orange Crush"), Metallica ("The Unforgiven"), and the absolutely brilliant video for Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street," which remains one of my all-time favorite examples of the form. The steady, beautiful progression of half-lit, half-seen imagery in this film knocked my socks off when I first viewed it as a teenager, and as you can see below, the clip remains just as striking and powerful now as it was back in 1987.
Now that is what a music video should be like.
For a lark, I am going to be making a couple more wintry Pink Floyd video clips before moving on. Almost since the time of its release, the second side of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason strikes me as particularly wintry kind of record, and I'm looking to sew together imagery that effectively demonstrates this association for others. What I want to create here are clips that create and sustain a mood that compliments the music, working in a similar fashion as the films used by Pink Floyd during their concerts. There will be no narratives, just a simulated immersion into the frigid, lonely twilight depths of winter ( minus of course the frozen extremities).
Next up for editing: "Yet Another Movie."
