Both the music and video here are my own. The tune is the 4th track from my solo album, Flux Aeterna and something I am very proud of. The interesting, squiggly, black and white animation is something I did myself on the Mac. It was created using the Leap Motion sensor (yes by waving my hands around) and utilizing one 3rd-party application called Beautiful Chaos, and another called Snapz.
Although the music here is entirely my own (from my first and only solo album, Flux Aeterna) in actuality, the video accompanying it is not. It comes from a 10-minute section out of the middle of a duely-purchased 30-minute royalty-free clip sold by a company (Motion Loops) that offers such things on the net. I added some of my own color and contrast tweaking, grunge FX, adjusted the length to fit the music, added intro and outro title cards, and a faux retro film clip tail at the end – all as my first entry lesson into digital motion graphics editing. You will have to forgive my one conceit in this . . . my love of foreign “Art House” films. I based my title and ending on old foreign (French) movies I’d seen in college film studies classes.
The music here is an uncharacteristic experiment on mine in the arena of electronic IDM (Intelligent Dance Music). As a piece it is entirely a creature of the studio, created from samples of guitar, drums, synths, and a whole host of odd electronic noises, tweaked to the extreme in specialized software. Most of what guitar there is in the piece is barely recognizable as such. The video is also my own, a fast flipping collection of personal still images from my own portfolio, random photos, news clips, icons, art and design projects. There are two layers of these. One passing by at 12.5 frames per second and the other at twice that, 25 frames per second. The video consists of these in a long crossfade that starts with the slower layer and moves on to the faster layer over the entire course of the video. Here I am getting a step or two deeper into video editing as I try to teach myself how to do things . . . experimenting. Again, you will have to forgive my conceit in the title and ending. I based them on old foreign (French) movies I’d seen in college film studies classes.
The music here is “Hubble” – from the opening track of my first and only solo album, Flux Aeterna. It inspired by the famous astronomer and the space telescope named after him. Just about the time I was creating this music, NASA was revealing images from the Hubble Deep Field project – images of galaxies so far away as to be at the edge of (or the limit of our ability to see) the universe. I concocted the video sequence here from a personally selected collection of royalty-free space-themed VJ loops (from Motion Loops). These I edited together to try to tell a kind of “cosmic story” over the course of a few minutes. Again, I added my own elements and FX . . . and styled it as a foreign “Art House” short.
This is a very, very short concert clip of a live performance, my “solo” opening for Pioneers at the Hall, a concert of live electro-acoustic music that included trumpeter Jeff Kaiser, Buchla synth master Todd Barton, along with additional analog synthesist Bruce Bayard – all together for one night on June 6, 2013. The lighting was dim in the extreme and the camera did not catch much. You can barely see me, and the projection on the back wall of an old 1929 silent film by Russian director Dziga Vertov, Man With The Movie Camera. Fortunately, the sound captured by the camera’s microphone (in mono) captures a pretty accurate listening experience. Imagine listening to this music in a dark auditorium, in stereo, and you have a picture of at least the down-tempo segments of one of my live shows. I tweaked the brightness and contrast of the video, and added sepia toning. You will just have to forgive the poor quality image.