Thursday, October 16, 2014

The Flood

Remember that song I created a couple of weeks ago? Well, our next assignment was to create a MASHUP video with the song. I did this by finding public domain footage from Archive.org and using Windows Movie Maker to put it all together. I tried to use FileLab to create the video, but it wouldn't open for me (I tried multiple browsers and downloaded the plugin about 400 times - *shrug*). Luckily, I had a little bit of experience with Movie Maker from editing bronchoscopy videos at work, so there wasn't much of a learning curve!

My inspiration was basically every TOOL music video I have ever seen. Adam Jones, who is the guitarist for TOOL makes their videos (he also worked on Jurassic Park!) The clips I chose were mostly claymation and stop-motion, because they replicated the style that TOOL uses. The mimes at the beginning and the skeleton riding the penny-farthing at the end just seemed to match perfectly with the style of the song (i.e. sort of dark and foreboding).

My editing techniques were mostly just splitting clips into smaller chunks, trimming the beginning and/or end, and arranging them in different ways until I had something that told a story. As far as WHAT the story actually IS, I will leave that to the viewer to decide! In many ways the process was very similar to creating the song.

If I could change anything about my MASHUP I might spend more time trying to perfectly align some of the movements in the video with the song, but this seemed to occur naturally enough that it would have been too painful in relation to the reward. The most difficult part of the assignment was trying to find existing video clips in the public domain that I felt would accomplish my goal. The biggest lesson I learned from this project was that I'm actually ABLE to create something cool from scratch - the whole process was super intimidating from the start.

So without any further ado here's my MASHUP video "The Flood". Please feel free to leave me a comment with your thoughts.


The Flood from Shannon Crandall on Vimeo.

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