Is it possible to create a music video on a computer from 1987? 📺 💾
I’ve always been fascinated by old computers. I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, when there were home computers from companies like Commodore or Atari, mainly used by kids like me to play games or to explore them in a creative way. Today, I collect some of these machines and keep them in my studio alongside my instruments. So it felt only natural to eventually use one of them for a creative project.
For this video, I chose the Commodore Amiga - first released exactly 40 years ago, in the summer of 1985. At the time, it had mind-blowing graphics and sound, years ahead of the Apple Macintosh or the IBM PC. While those still had 16-color or even only monochrome graphics, the Amiga could display near-photorealistic images with its 4096-color palette. It was arguably the first computer that was widely used as a tool to create art, animations and even CGI for TV shows like Babylon 5.
To create this video was so much more complicated than creating a video on a modern computer. I even had to write my own video editor first. But finally the result is ready.
It was probably the least efficient way possible to make a video. But it was such joy at times - it reminded me of how it felt to create things as a kid, before anything had to make practical sense and when one did it just for the fun of it and out of pure curiosity of what might be possible.
Video by Oskar Schuster & Angie Siveria, based on a poem by Angie Siveria
