Two intense days working on the 'Nightfood' video, for the title track of the album. Filmed some inserts yesterday. The video will have two independent tracks, as many of my post-Argus videos do; a filmed layer edited in AviSynth+, and an animated part made in Argus which features an alpha layer for the video parts, and an animated overlay. This is a simple but very powerful option. The 'Cat Covid!' video had 4 layers if I recall, but almost everything can be done with these two: mask and addition.
This means darting between segments, creating two videos and working out what will work when. For a 7 minute video, the challenges are considerable.
Today, submitted the music, and I noticed that the PRS Tunecodes for all of the tracks have changed since updating the records with the new ISRC codes a few days ago (noooo!). This is the first time this has happened in over a decade and 50 to 80 albums. It's not serious, but is a big headache regarding my admin work, as now some records (and the sheet music) have incorrect codes. I hope that the old codes are also still valid in some universe... to some extent. This is very annoying.
I've updated Argus a bit today, one key feature making easy to mass-colour tracks, as colouring these one at a time is too time consuming, and this multi-layer technique demands it.
I've decided to rein in the video work generally. YouTube is one of the main ways people listen to music, so that's one reason to make videos, but even the fast speed of a week or two per album is a quite a lot of time. With over 50 albums, that's over a year or my life just making videos, a medium I don't really like. Many are not as artistic or creative as my music or my painting, as well as being heavy in computing power and storage. If I had a year to live, would I keep making music videos for old music? Probably not. I would, I think, keep transcribing the sheet music as a legacy record of my musical art.
'Young Attractive' will feature a relatively simple lyric-video (still hand animated, of course). The first two tracks may use elements of 'Nightfood'. The waspy imagery is quite horrific at times, but it does reflect the dark nature of this music of loss and heartbreak, this romantic true story of those years from a decade ago.
I've heard that 'Punishment of the Sun' is to be exhibited in Ty Pawb over winter. This means finding new work for the biennial Grosvenor Exhibition on Chester. It's somewhat annoying that these two big biennials happen at the same time every two years. This will be the 4th time I've exhibited in the Ty Pawb Open; in every year it's been held apart from the Covid-19 year, which was heavily restricted. I don't think that one was possible for me to enter.
