Cruisin'

When I began this project I was intending to combine Big Band Jazz music with modern dance music, I quickly abandoned this endevour after realizing that public domain dance samples are hard to find. I came to the conclusion that sample based music was not my forte, if that part of my project was not going to be to my satisfaction I needed to have more than simply than audio.

Gradually, I moved towards creating a collage but not in the tradtional sense. Sure, the collage would consist of different elements, but I wanted my collage to seem "alive". This juxtaposes with the fact that the imagery that I used was very old and is considered to many to be dead in a way.

I combined these two trains of thought into the idea of a collage music video.

Using my V-Djing software and a very simple hip hop track, I wanted the collage to respond to the music. I wanted the effects to be created in real time and to be changed on the fly. You cannot achieve this using tradional prerendered frames from a video editor, which is why I decided to go this route.

This is the second figure from Nehemiah Grew's The anatomy of plants published in 1682.

This picture immediately caught my attention when I was browsing publicdomainreview.org. The fine lines and the intricate design seemed very orderly yet organic. I decided that a good way to emphasize the design would be to rotate the photo like a wheel would.

Using Adobe Photoshop CS6 I isolated the round design from the page where it originally was. I imported this into Magic Music Visuals and set parameters for the speed of rotation for the smallest iteration and the largest. The median iteration scaled up and down based on the kick drum for the hip-hop instrumental “Hometown” by Ryan Little. All three iterations also changed colors based on randomized values.

Restored car with surfboard on top of roof shot by Paul Brennan with a Nikon D7000.

1/250s, f 8.0, ISO 100, 70 mm. From publicdomainpictures.net.

I chose to use this picture in the remix since it was both modern and vintage, much like hip-hop music takes from the past and combines it with modern arrangments.

Using Photoshop CS6 I isolated the car from the background and took off the wheels. In Magic Music Visuals the car remained stationary except that it slightly increased in size with the volume of the music.

Short animated music video for the creative commons track "Hometown" by Ryan Little.

After bringing all the elements together, I added the waveform for the audio.