I'm more pleased with Pathetic Asexual Lump than I was anticipating. The music I'm normally proudest of is my 'proper, art' songs (such as can be found on my albums It Might Never Happen,
They're the pieces that take the longest, too. Other music I make tends to be done faster and often has a sillier edge. PAL started life as a sequel to Sexy Sex,
as I had lots of daft quotes left over and kept accruing more. When I began putting the quotes together in a catchy collage, I noticed that the track was becoming a commentary on how media bombards us with suggestive and sexual content (the 'verses'), as a contrast to how I actually feel (the 'choruses'). I began enjoying the track so much I wanted to make a video… but I didn't want it to be one of those 'proper' videos that cost me money. I also didn't want to simply use the original video clips that were the sources for the voices.
My original idea was to create a testing centre for 'sexy' music videos. I could pastiche music videos that were intended to be sensuous or sexy, but made with test robots. (It's a cliche of course that asexuals often feel represented by aliens and robots, and I'm no exception to that, but I had a model of a crash test dummy I could use.) The joke would be that in each case the video situation isn't ready and things start going wrong. I had an image of a crash test dummy twerking, but its bottom comes loose and starts vibrating on the floor off on its own for the remainder of the video, for instance. Or there could be shots of dummies embracing as ocean waves crash around them, or dummies dancing at the Moulin Rouge. This all seemed like a lot of work to get something that would hold the viewer's attention for over four minutes!
So I had another idea: take a public domain film, preferably a romance musical, edit it to four minutes, and then use a lip-synch program to make the actors say all the ridiculous quotes on the track. There'd be an amusing mis-match between what the actors were performing and what was happening in the music. However, I quickly discovered that I couldn't do this and make it look half-way decent, so the joke was lost. I still think it's a good idea.
Eventually, I found a website called Playphrase.me. One can put a quote in, and it'll find you some clips from TV and films of people saying those words. That appealed because it re-contextualises the video sources, just as the music has re-contextualised the sound sources. That wouldn't work for the repetitive choruses, though, so I went back to my 'sexy video testing centre' idea for those sections.
I found it interesting that the actor's mouths don't always seem to match the words. This is because the sound sources mainly had British accents, and the clips were usually from the USA. The differing pronunciation between UK and US vowels often require different mouth shapes.
I moved the video clips so the mouths were always in the centre, as otherwise the viewer's eye doesn't have enough time to dart around the screen to see the actor saying each line. It also might be worth noting that I'm no cineaste, and have seen hardly any of these films and TV shows.
Possibly the thing I should make the most fuss of, though, is that I started making both the music and the video during evenings when I felt I hadn't got anything useful done that day, and I wanted something at least to show for it. So there's maybe a lesson for myself there.
PAL is a track from my new music collection!
areudirty
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
ellievsbear
dailybridgerton
pixelskylines
yousharknotpass
origamiaround