I decided to make a new video, as an exercise. A quickie—took me two days. Another music video, but this one is for a song I made myself a good while ago, together with Matt Peter.
I used a few family photos from the late eighties, playing up their graininess and color patterns. Their texture made for a much less mechanic-looking set of kaleidoscopic compositions than what is probably the norm. It was also my intention to play with alternately obscuring and revealing the nature of the images, hiding them in the geometry, and slowly giving way to recognizable objects and people. The middle section is intentionally psychedelic, switching to meet the mood of the music. Toward the end it’s much more of a nostalgic slide-show of memories.
In six days, spaced over three weekends, three guys online, recording songs collaboratively, grabbing what the other made and putting some guitar on top, or some stream-of-consciousness vocals, or some crazy radio static. That was the dynamic that resulted in the creation of Tree, a full-length (well, 30 minutes long) digital release by The Color and the Leaves project!
What we lack in technical skills we make up for in craziness, I think. Lots of good stuff in there, and I can even count some of my own in that category! Tools used (other than the boring ones) include: a Game Boy emulator, an actual Game Boy, a keyboard running out of batteries, and a kettle. The two guys who made this with me are Matt Peter (go listen to his stuff) and Cody Ross (first timer, like me—though he can actually play his musical instruments, which is unlike me).
If you think that having this digital thing sitting there in your harddrive is not very exciting, and decide to burn it on a CD, here’s a sleeve design I made, which you can print on a regular letter, or similar sized, paper sheet (on both sides). After you print it, all you need to do is fold around the edges of the square, length-wise first. The overlapping flaps can be fit one into the other to neatly close it.
