Sunday, January 03, 2021

Jabberwocky Video, Otamatone Modification

Day two of working on the Jabberwocky video. I want to get it done as quickly as possible but this stage seems achingly slow. I've made two more drafts, noting the bits that are good enough and bits that certainly need redoing. I filmed some of the Jabberwocky itself. I need to work on the transitions, fades and flickers. Rather than listing possible ideas it's usually more efficient to instantly do them... I must remember to do this! But there are always cases of trying things that don't, in the end, work.

My latest idea is to have a montage of 50 to 100 images about the history of the Jabberwocky and Lewis Carroll and text from the book.

In the middle of the day I listened to the BBC Radio3 new music show, the only good exposé of cutting edge music around. This inspired me to thing about composing a concerto for Theremin or some otherworldly instrument, then I remembered that I had an Otamatone; so I decided to dismantle it and fit it with a 1/4 inch jack plug so that I could plug it into my guitar amp.

The procedure was very fiddly - the whole device is so cheap and shoddy. The compartment for batteries is held there by a screw and a very high tension spring. But after some soldering I attached a couple of wires to the exact same terminals as the tiny speaker. I then drilled a hole in the case and threaded them out.

The downside is, it's so loud through headphones that I'm afraid of plugging this cheap toy into my £400 amplifier. So I'll wait until I can try it on something cheaper first... the Otamatone really needs a volume control itself, but it hasn't got one.

I must pull myself together and work at full speed on the video tomorrow. I've also been rather chilly, coughy and sneezy today. It feels like a regular allergy, chill, micro-virus that inflicts me every 10 days or so. On we roll!