A steady day of music video work. I started on the final edits of 'All Controlled By Someone', and, for some strange reason, everything was now one frame out! I don't know why, but it meant going through the film section by section and correcting it. One frame matters because it made the video part out of sync with the animations.
This made me think that life, life as an anti-entropic force, is about correcting errors. We are born. We work. We die. All life works tirelessly. Humans now perhaps work with the aspiration to make enough money, to earn enough social power, to afford to stop working, or to afford to work 'voluntarily'. Most animals (and plants!) don't, they merely keep working, for their social good (yes even plants work!) and their job is ordering that which is chaotic, because those beings which do not are destroyed by calamity, and those beings which are ordered can endure disasters due to informational resilience.
The video was fixed and the single version edit created, then work on other videos for the album. Most of these were half complete.
'Smashing My House Of Cards' is primarily an edit of falling playing cards, but I wanted to add more, so I did some filming of singing the verses. I had to do this without my darling Deborah to operate the camera, so it took longer than normal, but the results were adequate. This uses the simplest mix method of a mask with addition to layer the video with the animation.
'Violet Night' and 'What You Could Have Won' are wholly animated, and use a simple effect of flight over the sea. I recorded an initial startled face for 'Fear is Everywhere' but it didn't work, so I made it entirely from public domain stock footage from a film about preparations for nuclear war.
At 13:30 I went out for wood and brackets for more building projects. One is a cabinet integrated into the mantelpiece, making a shelf-rack where the fire used to be. It will feature Z-bend doors with a seamless wallpaper covering to make the cabinet appear invisible when the doors are closed. There are a few complicating factors. I don't want to permanently damage the mantelpiece, so it must be removable and have minimal effect, it will be fixed by two thin (but very long) screws. The shelves don't have to bear much weight, but enough so that it will need to rest on the floor, or else those two screws would hold all of the weight, because the shelves are fitted only into my section via slots; that way I can avoid adding shelf supports into the mantelpiece alcove. Finally, my frame will have to fit exactly, sub-millimetre accuracy, or it won't look pretty. As I work on the videos, I'm occasionally thinking about the challenges here.
Several music videos need work from scratch, but I can't spend long. I often have problems with what I think of as the 'best' songs. 'Style Guru Fashion Queen' from my last album was one of the best songs, with real hit potential, and I had really clear images in my mind of drag queens and Diana Dors-type glitz and glitter, and all sorts of things, but all of that is for the future. In the end, the video became a placeholder, almost a looping animation while it rests in the slumber of potentiality.
'More', 'Tainted Pain', 'Daytime Teevee', 'Breakfast of Delight', and 'Walls (And How To Hit Them)' remain to do. I may end up using simple animations.
So much other news. Three songs are now complete for the charity Christmas album 'Christmas Tails'. I noticed in the local news that Parveen Smith, who I interviewed on my radio programme, and she in turn interviewed me about my art and music on her radio station, has won a United Nations award for humanitarian causes. My sound effects set for SFXEngine, Army Sounds, has been released. Plans for Deb's poetry book launch on the 7th are moving ahead. So much to do. I must finish all of the music videos in 5 days.
Onwards we charge.
