video.

FINALLY. I accidently left Youtube on on my account over night, but thankfully it actually completed downloading and no one messed with my account between 1:30 yesterday afternoon and now. 7 attempts later, here is the video.

enjoy, dudes.

the waiting game.

As if waiting for my video to render every time I made any changes during editing wasn't bad enough, now I have to spend even more time waiting for my video to upload onto the internet. My video wouldn't fit on vimeo, so I have resorted to Youtube. Unfortunately, I have been here for about an hour now, and I'm still only at about 29%. Coooool that it's taking so long, and that I have other things to do today. Cool Youtube. Cool and speedy. Speedy and efficient use of my time. Glad.

Whatever, I'll have the video up soon enough hopefully. 

Behhhh. 

no room to live

I've been thinking about using animation and realtime video for this video project, and it reminded me of this super cool video I saw. It's Times New Viking's video for their song No Room to Live.  The band shot the video originally on film, then split up the individual frames and sent bunches of them to a differnt artists telling them to animate them as they wished. Such a great idea. Such a sweet sweet video.

learning

I really enjoy working with video. Over the past Summer I actually had a super sweet job working with making a series of short videos generally about how to live sustainably in St. Johns (it was kind of the best job ever). The videos were for a website that a lady named Kim Todd had been dreaming about creating for years, and had now finally been able to realize. I was working with three other people, we travelled around St. John's and surrounding areas interviewing local businesses, farms, gardens, etc, meeting all kinds of really cool people and learning a tonne about sustainability as well as St. Johns. I also learned a lot about video-making. For each video there would be one or two people assigned to film, one person to record sound, and one or two people to conduct the interview. I learned to use all of the sound and video equipment, how to work with a 'crew' of sorts, and I even got to make a few animations to throw into the videos! I could talk about the whole experience for hours, it was awesome. The website is called thegreenrock.ca , the site isn't fully launched yet, but the videos are scheduled to be released throughout the fall.

Another awesome experience I had working with video was for the video project we had last year in intro. Joe and I collaborated for the project because we had already come up with an idea for a video that we were both super excited about, so when the video project rolled around we decided it was a perfect opportunity to put the idea into action. Joe's friend's band let us use one of their songs as the soundtrack to the video, its actually a really cool song, and I believe it assisted in creating the mood and overall feeling that we were trying to accomplish. We included animation in the process as well, so trying to fit this entire idea into the span of the two weeks we had to work on the project was pretty crazy.

This was our final product:

I really enjoyed making this video, and I'm really glad we worked together on it. Our ideas and views on certain aspects were sometimes completely alligned, often quite different, but always found a way to work together harmoniously. I'm super happy with how it turned out.

Now, to come up with an idea for this video project...

remix

I find the documentary we're watching really interesting. I already listened to Girl Talk quite a bit, and  actually wondered about what the deal was with the copyright. I've had conversations with my friends about how insanely expensive it must be to make his music. His music, as is pointed out in the documentary, would be super expensive if he was paying for all of those samples. The range of music he uses is incredible, nearly all of the songs used are easily recognizable, sampling from all genres, over a large time span. He samples from artists like Jackson 5, Electric Light Orchestra, Fugazi, Lil Wayne, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Black Sabbath, Ramones, N.W.A, The Doors, Ludacris, just to name a few. And by a few I mean thats probably about as many names are in a single song, if not less. I find his music really interesting, and I especially did the first time I heard it. I'd recognize parts of songs that I would never expect to hear in a mash up and get really excited about it, and then he'd introduce another, and another, mixing together artists that you would probably never even consider in the same thought otherwise. The dudes super smart.

One part of the documentary, the part about Disney, reminded me of another artist. He calls himself Pogo, and he started as a youtube sensation. He remixes sounds that he finds in Disney movies into new songs, and new videos. I have no idea what his deal is, I heard he works for Disney, but I can't seem to find anything on it. He must have some affiliation with them, because obviously they would otherwise be preventing him from making this music. Also, on his wikipage, one of the two "controversies" listed was that Disney hadn't yet allowed his Pirates of the Caribbean remix to be released, suggesting that Disney had allowed the rest of his music to be released. Curious. I actually enjoy what music I've heard from him, as well as the videos that he makes by remixing the clips from the movies which he sampled.

Here are links to three of his songs: Alice, Bloom, Expialidocious as well as his website: pogomix.net

Pretty neat.

Thinking About Sound Art

This first project has me super excited. I've never worked with sound art, and to be entirely honest I've haven't really thought about it much as a medium that I could work with. I'm not sure why I haven't, because music and sound have always really interested me, but in my mind music and sound art were always in a separate category than visual arts, so I never really gave it much thought. I am so glad that we're starting the year with this project, because even just learning about sound art, and thinking about the way that I personally am affected by it has opened my eyes to so many possibilities and ideas that I don't think I could have arrived at otherwise.

When we started talking about sound art in class, it reminded me of a few artists who I listen to that use samples and found sounds to create their music. I never considered them to be sound artists but I find that the more I learn about sound art, the harder time I'm having trying to find the line between sound art and music ( if that line even exists). I thought about artists like The Avalanches and The Books, both of which take samples from outside sources to create their music. Although these examples probably lean more to the music side of the spectrum (especially the Avalanches) rather than the sound art side, I think it is still arguable that elements of sound art are definitely exhibited in their work.