The first was by our friend Sarah (for Doesn't Matter No One Cares). (She's in these bands, may as well publicise, why not: Double Vanity / Plaster Of Paris.) The second was by Lauren (for The Boring Apocalypse). I now present to you our third, The Answer Is No:
YouTube showed me TWO ADS when I clicked on this. Do we get paid for that? NFI.
This is the first music video I have made. I've been compiling cool phone footage for ages to use in music videos, if I had a clue how to make them. Recently I got a programme and dabbled. I was really into this footage of a snail eating a leaf. I later realised how Liars used a snail as the star of an album-length music video (which was so unmemorable that nobody has bothered to put it online - so here's their other, more interesting album-length video they did for the album instead).
I thought The Answer Is No would be a good single and was existential/probing enough to lend itself to a wide variety of visual accompaniments. I put it on while looking at the footage and thought it worked - it added a certain poignancy to the snail. However, the snail was TOO FAST! It became hypnotic at slower speeds.
HEY SLOW DOWN, YA CRAZY KID!!!
The first random control I twiddled in the video editing programme did something interesting to the colours. I thought I was just going to make the entire video an unbroken shot of the snail.
I watched it again a few days later and realised that nobody wants to just look at a god damned snail for 3 minutes. Nobody else, anyway.
Hey Pat this music video is amazing. a snail in slow motion, a rollercoaster ride start to finish
So I found other footage I'd taken that looked good, and now that I'd learned the "change the colours" trick, I started doing more bits. Then I figured out how to colour-replace bits of footage with other footage (a kind of 'green screen' effect I guess) and from there I just went stupid.
Then I thought showing the lyrics would be cool. So I typed out, printed, and cut and taped together the song as a very long piece of paper. Then I did a bit of 'special effects' (put my phone on top of a beer glass and pulled the lyrics past underneath, using the base of the glass as a filter.
So there you have it. The 'concept' of my music video. It suits the expectations of somebody who doesn't mind things moving a little slowly. If you want a quick cut hype fest, this ain't it. I'm more into those classic alternative videos like Velouria that force a slow-moving situation onto you and you either lower your pulse to suit it or you watch something else. I guess in the youtube era, the competition for your attention has never been so stiff, so videos like this won't do well. We sent it to the Bloggers That Be but nobody we asked was interested in doing a launch for it. But whatevs, we like it. If you don't, suck a fart.
Tell me this isn't a great video
I also think if you're going to do graphics-type effects, they should be openly crude and on the nose:
I ain't never going anywhere... with my video editing career, that is.
P.S. HOLY SHIT GUYS, WE HAVE A GIG
Our good friend Dougie asked us to play at an Applecore NYE backyard show in Northcote, Applecore being a great local backyard music festival that used to happen every summer. Lauren and my first mate-date outside of our first band Ohms (along with our then-bandmate, Brad) was Applecore 2013. Solid lineup too! Event page here. Dougie was thoughtful enough to remember that outdoors is safer for a lung transplantee such as I.
Dougie has even offered to be our 3rd member for playing live. We all jammed the other day and it was sounding pretty good! Looking forward to taking our sound live, which seems like a massive, scary leap (not even Lauren and I have jammed any of our 40 released songs together). We'll let you know how it goes!
P.P.S. NYE will be the 5 year anniversary of the previous gig I played live (as part of Creedence Crapwater Revival).
HNY folks.
Pat.