Another full day of work on the A Drive Through The Town media.
Today, I subtitled and edited the lyric reading videos. This involved cropping the recordings, then watching and noting the frame numbers of each spoken line. Then creating images (and mask images, the subtitles have alpha-outlines) for each lyric line, then saving those out. There are 8 to 20 of subtitle images per video. After that, I use an AviSynth script to overlay the subtitles onto the video and voila.
The results this time are my best to date, in video quality, audio quality, and performance. I wonder at times if this is worth it, this unusual medium, but the work isn't huge, and doing anything nobody else does has great value. This is a good philosophy for art.
I've nearly completed all of the same work as I did on We Robot (though for that, I also spent a week making full-screen animated videos for every track). The music for We Robot was completed on 19th July 2023, with mastering complete on 5th August for a release of 27th October. Almost all of August and much of September was spent creating these materials, including a video for the 'AI And Celebrity' single.
If I were a famous pop/rock star, of around now or of the past 20 years, I'd write (or not write, merely perform) 10 to 15 songs and spend a year performing them all over the place, and then probably spend the next 20 years performing them too, and consider all of that a just and satisfying life. I'm already bored with these songs, brilliant though I think they are, I know I can do better. As an artist, I need to make more, do more. I have much more potential to fill, and time is short.
Onwards.
