Awake early today for some productive action. Started with monthly backups, and accounts and the conclusion of Christmas Tails. We raised £411.29 in the end, and this has today been transferred to the RSPCA.
Then some updates to the events page of my website, followed by a day of work on the Sisyphus album, this time calculating the frames for each lyric line for all of the song lyrics, then hand creating those lyric lines as images, one per line, like this:
I like to have the lyric font match the album artwork. This is partly the point, to add more to my videos than cheap automated subtitles can.
How I despise AI created rubbish! I can see that AI could be a useful tool, but for art at the moment I am happy to avoid it by a wide margin. At the moment I feel that to touch AI at all would taint all future art with it, harm and devalue the hugely hard work I put into my art, my music, my videos. I've never used AI anything, or pitch-correction, or any artificial stuff, and wouldn't ever want people to think I had. I fear that those who do use it will never learn a skill, and it they did it would be too late; that people would mistake their skill for AI. I love that Bandcamp have banned AI music, and that YouTube is cracking down on the worst sorts of AI videos (copycats, harvested content, misleading content). The ability to upload a film script to a program and have it create the resulting film is, however, somewhat alluring.
My lyric graphics are now done, which amounts to about half of the work of making full length lyric videos in Argus. The next steps are creating sequences to make each image appear at the right frame. All of this will take about a day for the whole album, not bad.
I also need to mix and master the album, and possibly re-record the 'We Shall See' vocals because I made one mistake in the lyrics that annoys me. This album is, I think at about the half-way stage of its remaster.
My sense of completeness can drive me crazy. I can see how I can next remaster my favourite album, Nightfood, and that my singing and production is now good enough to do some other songs better justice, like those on Secret Electric Sorcery. There's also the need for sheet music for all of my older electronic albums, which is a much easier task. Yet, all of this would take me a full year, and without any reward - or at least no immediate reward. The long term demands such completeness.
I have a few interesting painting ideas and ache to charge into those. I listened to a few Havergal Brian symphonies last night and suddenly feel that I could compose some. My teeth still hurt, several months of this, and money is too short; both explain nocturnal anxieties, yet my drive is strong. The shortness and preciousness of life and ability is daily made clear
Let us charge into the war-torn valley. Our boulder rolls free in this little region of downward slope, we must run to catch it for the next hill. Perhaps over that crest we'll see a greener plain, a dreamed-for goal.
