Here you can see the complete background and lightening “equipment” that we have used for our music video. The light on the left side has 500 Watts, attached to a microphon stand, the light on the right is a daylight lamp. The green screen comes from ebay and is about 3x5 m, attached with some tape to the wall and to the floor. The canvas has no function at all, we just forgot to put it away.
This part of the video shot was really fun. This illustrates one aspect of a woman’s personality, a mixture of being seductive and also over-the-top. You can see JAM during the recording, with a blond wig and some 50’s sun glasses, a bikini top and panty, “enlarged” breasts with a bunch of socks, combined with red stockings and pink 70’s high-heels, while trying to look somehow sexy. The make-up is extreme, although strangely it looks kind of normal on the video. Smoking and singing at the same time, while posing and trying not to loose her balance. Kind of an artistic act …
undo = to save yourself from yourself
This is C. Binger, marking the green screen after extensive scratching on it. He is one of our fearless two cats that both appear in the music video “Beauty” - not because we planed it, but because there was no way to make them leave the fabric anyway. CBinger is a real punk with tons of energy, named after the now closed CBGB club in New York and after the Cream drummer Ginger Baker because of his rather reddish yellow fur. You can also see one part of our “professional” light equipment: a daylight lamp bought to fight winter depression (doesn’t work), but a good choice for indoor photography and video shots. As you can also see, we taped the green screen fabric on the floor.
This is Jam on the green screen in a school girl outfit, practicing some moves before the video shot. The green screen is taped to the wall and the floor, and we had two lights, both originally used for photography: the light on the left has 500 Watts, the light on the right produces day light that should help against feeling down in winter (but actually you only become very tired staring in the light, so I can’t recommend it, except you want to survive the winter sleeping all day).
This is JAM totally exhausted taking off the wig, the high-heels and the fake socks breast stuffings after the last take for our music video. The recording took 3 hours in total, until 3 in the morning.
When musicians improvise, their brains turn inhibitions down and creativity up.
http://bobulate.com/post/380190848/measuring-creativity
› Not Plagiarism but Mixing and Matching, Says Best-Selling German Author, 17
I would argue that the callow Ms. Hegemann is missing the whole “transformation” part of the long history literary theft.
But Jessa Crispin puts it best:
… Maybe next she can tell us how we can be authentic by ripping off other people’s original ideas and words.
Finally literature has arrived in the same desolate state of creativity that the sheer mass of sampling in the music industry knows for more than 20 years. Welcome to the club! Stealing ideas and artistic performance is not only annoying, but also a sad thing. If you do that you have to face it: you know that you have nothing to say - and hopefully no one will notice.
Working on our next music video, we test and try a lot with 3D. This is a small example of one test, looks kind of cute, and I really like the bouncing feather-like fluffy hair. The possiblities are sheer endless, and I’m afraid, we’ll have to write a story board sooner or later. At least, this is how it worked with the Beauty video we finished last week.
This is a 3D model consisting of serval instances of our studio sofa. I have no idea if we can use this in our next video, but it looks kind of spacious and inviting.
Most of our songs are a result of improvising, and we try to keep the improvising character in the final version.
Usually, everything begins with Robin having some guitar riffs, recording some drums and a bass line, and I’ll try to find a melody that somehow fits to this raw structure. My first lyrics are always a strange mixture of existing words and something that sounds more or less like words, however, the most important thing is that it sounds good. We always record the first draft to catch some unexpected twists, lines and expressions, which is a lot of fun and after that we tend to think that the rest will be as easy as it has been never before.
The next step is the hard work: the fine structuring of the song, cutting melody parts in ProTools, then testing the final melody and lyrics, until we come up with a version that could work. Then we start recording, which is most of the time a disappointment, because the elaborated version always lacks the energy of the first improvised recording. This is followed by great frustration, normally a good fight, testing different microphones, buying some futile equipment, and various statements that can be summed up to “I’ll never do this again!” or “Why do I do this to me?” or “Why do you do this to me?”
After that, and the conclusion that whatever we do, we’ll be dead in 50 years anyway (quote from Music & Lyrics), we go on with the song. After another day of recording we change everything while improvising and declare the song as finished. Robin then does all the final arrangements and the mix, I usually complain about my voice sound, which drives him in a constant state of madness, and when we reach the point that both of us really do not care about the song anymore, we publish it on some web sites.
Once the song is online, we start to listen to it for the first time, which is always followed by several remixes and so on. In consideration of this devastating progress, it is a miracle that we have meanwhile finished nine songs (however, most of them will be re-recorded with a new microphone next week), and that we also produced our first own music video during Christmas in our living room with no budget and no professional help. Hope you like it!
Another short animation test for our next music video MICHAEL. We are still looking for ideas, because the lyrics are, compared to BEAUTY, kind of simple and improvised during a late night session. Hopefully we make it in time, we have still 23 days to Bahrain left, according to the Ticker on formula1.com.
And another 3D test for our next video. This time, the emphasis is on illustrating speed and velocity. The boxes are just a placeholder, but we’re not sure by now what kind of objects will fly through the air in the end.
We’re trying to avoid the clean shiny look that a lot of 3D animations have, and prefer a more sketch-like appearance. Nice side-effect: the workstation works so hard (and noisy) that we could turn of the radiators in this room - and it is still cosy and warm…
As you can see, the boxes pass through the Michael letters at the end of the video, this is not intentional. If anyone has an idea how to solve this, you’re welcome! Created in Cinema 4D.
What do you do if you have no clue what your next music video should look like? Exactly, you watch other people’s music videos, desperately hoping that this will give you an idea of what’s possible, while using a process of elimination, meaning “This is not what I want”, and also keeping the door open for inspiration without being eclectic.
So we went to Vimeo and did some two hours research in this group. We were generous with giving likes, and admiration, trying hardly to avoid the rising feeling of frustration that is inevitably linked to such an approach.
I didn’t realize it at first, mostly because I live on a planet far from earth, with green grass, dancing butterflies, where everything is for free and people just love each other, that most of these music videos have been produced by record companies. It just occurred to me after a while, when words like “director”, “lightening team”, and “animators” (please note the plural) in the credits finally made it to my brain.
I felt like baking a cake to compete with Unilever’s sweet sales in the supermarket around the corner.
“Did you see, they have a director?”, I said to Robin, who was already in a state of agony, probably visiting my home planet. We don’t have a director, we are two people, one pushing the record button on our sufficiently working camcorder, the other one doing something before a green screen, both hoping that the post-production on our rusty old workstation will lead to “something cool”.
And this morning, I realized that I couldn’t remember any song. Strange thing. Shouldn’t this all be about the music at the first place? I had consumed all these flawless images, scenes in perfect lightening, animations that would take years only to render - but where did they belong to?
I know, it is a necessity to illustrate music these days. MTV has spoiled us, and it is so convenient to just consume pre-thought images instead of letting your mind create own images for a song. Maybe all the writers should stop producing literature, and just make movies; this would save us all from investing too much time and effort in being part of carefully formulated thoughts and expressed feelings.
At the same time, I realized that since we have the Beauty video online and showed it some friends, we only received feedback on the images, the video, but not nothing about the music, nothing like “Good song”, or “Well, I’m not into that kind of stuff, sounds like speed metal”, or even “Yes, my mom liked it”.
So the question is: is music still perceived if it is presented on its own? Or do we need images to decide if we like a song or not? Or wouldn’t we even watch the video if the song creeps the hell out of me in the first place? Or would we manage to listen to a style that we obviously do not like, but later-on, after the images have done their work, change our mind to “not that bad”?
What happened to me yesterday evening was that I even couldn’t remember the music, which is not a good sign. I mean, at least one song should have made it to my center of taste.
If everyone would be like me, and I hope that’s not the case, the music has become secondary when you watch a video. Music is, however, a factor that can make you last 
till the end of a video. But I don’t think that most unfamiliar songs without visualization can be strong enough to make it, with some exceptions of course, especially when it comes to established bands like Metallica. This might sound a bit devastating, but is probably the ugly truth.
However, an interesting question would be if James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, for whatever reason, would picture themselves for a song on Death Magnetic in a Californian toy shop in Armani business suits, feeding popcorn to puppies with pink ribbons, if that would change the perception of the song. Maybe.
Videos that caught our interest yesterday were:
The Airplane Boys - Catalogue Girl
PopKid 2000 - PlayBoy’s Bend
The Toxic Avenger - Toxic is Dead
the dead pirates - wood
arjanM - blackhole
Cinnamon Chasers - Luv Deluxe
