Still thinking of music videos, so much missing. As a result, I have revisited The Love Symphony. In 2015 for the Phenomenology of Love exhibition I made the 42 minute Love Symphony film (the details are probably blogged here), but for reasons of file size I didn't keep all of the source videos. I'm constantly aware of the efficiency of storing the right quantity of data. In this case, it made it difficult to make edits or new versions of the film without a crude and destructive cut of the full film.
Last year I re-downloaded as much of the source material as I could locate. At least one film is lost forever, simply deleted from the Internet Archive. Most of the other films (at least 20) were still there, but needed re-converting, and I was unsure whether I had resized these, or converted the frame rates. There were also some self-recorded films which I also deleted (perhaps most foolishly of all as these were certainly unique). These were however very short segments which were made hurriedly and can be easily mimicked.
I've spent part of yesterday and today recompiling the footage for the first 10-minute track, There is no Love and the More I search the Less I Find. The result isn't 100% like the original but is very close. Some segments, such as the San Francisco Earthquake segments seem to have changed since 2015, they seem more grey (rather than pinkish, apparently not a result of my colouration) and perhaps a little cleaner, but this might well have been due to my original conversion. I am using identical software however. There were two hand filmed segments; of a receding clock, and a clock face. I have re-filmed these hurriedly in one take, although arguably these look little better than the original because they are now the same clock and seen from the same attitude, conveying an air of reminiscence. The original 2015 clock was a rather beautiful, antique grandfather clock owned by the artist Jan Pienkowski.
After compiling the final film, I used AviSynth to set the original film side by side with the new one to check that it was frame identical. In timing it is, and many frames are identical. There are some slight changes due to 'hand' editing of a few sequences.
I'd like to make a higher quality remake of this film one day. For now, this will do. It's a piece of history. The final segment is also quite complex. If I can edit that together, then I will have the vast majority of the material of the original 42 minute film. For now, this new edit is set for a YouTube premiere on Saturday 27th July at 6pm.
I still wonder whether a separate YouTube Channel just for my music videos would be a good thing. My channel broadly covers art and painting, performances of various sorts, experimental films and ArtSwarm-like video-poems, short musical pieces, and full 'official' music videos. This might make it harder for people who only like one thing to see just that one thing, although everything is divided into playlists. One argument against this move is that I've got some music that isn't officially released, like the Plastic Superman song, and other ArtSwarm music. Would that be for my art channel, or music video channel?
Ideally I would now blink and have videos for all of my extant music, well, those highlight tracks currently shown on the Cornutopia Music channel.
Now off today to deliver a new painting masterpiece to a customer. This work is a paragon of my new symphonic style, and I hope to talk about its merits at some point, but for now, it must remain a secret.
