Here’s a music video that I edited for Weeping Icon for the song “Two Ways.”
From the press release:
Two Ways’ is about people who want to appear virtuous in their public facing personality, but live a contradictory shadow life in which they do whatever they please, no matter how harmful their actions are to others. It’s told through the voice of a man named Todd (yes, that’s his real name!) who I encountered a few years back. He used a harmful term towards a woman he was angry with, then accepted a long explanatory talk from me, appeared to reflect, enthusiastically told me he’d appreciated me taking the time to educate him and agreed to change his behavior, and then immediately found that same woman and started calling her harmful sexist names without a moment between. I was truly in shock at how comfortable he was with his personality being stratified into two layers – the outward-facing kind, modern man, looking to learn from the necessarily rapid changes in society – and the sinister, selfish sadist beneath who believes in his own entitlement to act with impunity.
This was an interesting project, mostly because there were no scripts, no shotlists, and certainly no slates, just a half hour of footage, and a rough story idea.
The band was really great, let me do my thing, and ultimately we turned this video around in about 11 hours, from first watching the footage, to delivering for youtube.
The process was pretty simple:
First, we did a full edit of the music video, with rough GFX thrown in, and ‘locked picture’ at 16×9 (the native aspect ratio of the footate).
From there, we stripped the all the GFX from the edit, reframed for 4:3, and laid it off to tape multiple times – once as a ‘clean’ version, and then 3 other times with more analog glitch/distortion.
We captured all 4 takes of the VHS, combined them in the edit, overlaid the GFX back into the (now distorted) edit, and laid the entire master off to tape.
Final Step was to capture that output, drop it into After Effect, and apply a Detail Preserving Upscale to the entire project, bringing it to 4k.
Super Simple, Cheap & Cheerful, and a lot of fun.
Here’s some links to some press about it:
Weeping Icon – “Two Ways” (Stereogum)
Weeping Icon: “Two Ways” (Punknews)
Weeping Icon Share New Track “Two Ways”, New EP “Ocelli” Out This Friday (Front View)
Weeping Icon – Two Ways (If It’s Too Loud)
Weeping Icon Shares New Song (Closed Captioned)
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