Yes, second videoclip from Dada LP, this time for Marcel Duchamp. I built that track taking some interview parts I found on youtube and glitching/fatboyslimming 'em.
To make this videoclip, I sync/adapted original footage to track treatment, added some pics of Duchamp's most famous art pieces, plus a few small animations floating around to give a joyful mood (Duchamp was a provoking guy, needless to say), or sometimes underline his concepts.
I believe it's like a documentary in music, so I found it quite apt for his duty.
I made a clip from this old track because its theme was domestic violence, loneliness within a couple, and women discrimination issue. I pointed directly to domestic violence and related despair ("legal" raping - which isn't in any way true, except in a known abetment among machos). It can be disturbing for sensible people.
I rendered again Belief: Wrath, Belief: Greed and Thar Desert in HD 720p and uploaded on Hox Vox Box channel. I also added some variations.
Belief: Greed got no blue tint now, and it's tighter to original "Peyote" animation.
In Belief: Wrath I added sparkles when hammers land on the anvil and a couple of motion blur fx. Few and small retouches.
Last was retitled Thar Desert 2.0 because I added circa 150 new animations. Essentially is the old Thar Desert populated by many other moving elements.
Just uploaded last videoclip from Étoile, Jeanne d'Arc. This time I worked with paint effects on some footages about Crusades, Jeanne d'Arc and east europe (looking like a little middle east) singers. Track is, briefly, about the juxtaposition of western guitar arpeggios and middle east vocals.
My intention was putting together women from both sides in Cusades: a western woman, the "étoile" in this case, which dared to act like a male soldier in a demented inquisition environment; and docile eastern singers. They got no moments of glory followed by dying on a pyre, but a continuous subordination, so actually it's a pondering about women's troubles in western or eastern world. Different ways and degrees of cruelty, same patriarchism.
Clip simply follow this scheme and adds a movie picture support. I needed just a couple of days to finish it as it's a "punk" expression in videomaking. This time I tried to catch the result on the fly, without exceeding in refurbishing every single frame. Not a draft, but a quicker language. And a different subject, it wasn't the right place to unleash some After Effects frenzy quirknesses. At the opposite, I worked on slow motion footages, to achieve a relaxed but a little gloomy mood.
I found quite cruel in the last sequence to put side by side Jeanne d'Arc in flames and a smiling singer. It was not intended as a revenge of muslim on a christian, but the cruelty in life itself. While one is dying, the other is enjoying his art.
I received an email from Jamendo telling me Зимний дворец videoclip is recommended clip on their blog today. This is the review:
Hox Vox is a progressive rock project by Italian artist Gianluca Missero. His track “Zimniy Vorets (the Winter Palace)” is an experimental piano piece evoking the Russian revolution.
The video that goes with it is an interesting assemblage of old footage from the early 20th century and animated film made with collages, set in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Not your typical pop music video; then again, Hox Vox’s stuff isn’t your typical pop music either.
Enjoy the weird atmosphere emanating from the whole thing below. This is taken from the album “Outskirt“.
Hell if the guy was scared the music was too avantgarde! :-)) The small, but proportionally decent feedback says that dance people escaped as it was logical to expect, and the few adventurous listeners had a taste.
after Intro, from Etoile, I finished another video and released within september! This time I went back to Outskirt, and chosen Зимний дворец (Zimniy Dvorets, the Winter Palace). An historical theme: 1905 St. Petersburg bloody sunday. Subject is the Winter Palace, empty after Tsar Nicholas II leaved for Alexander Palace because of that massacre: an outskirts zone. Despite being in St. Petersburg center and rich as a royal manor can be, it was empty like a desert for a while. Interesting, when there are mutations.
Video tells about this story, showcase the palace, outside and inside, then steer to history with original footages - very bad coded, I had to struggle for half an afternoon to achieve a good acceptable quality - and pics, all taken from Wikipedia, pianist comprised.
Clip have a strange old russia taste, not communist nor tsar-like. A generical first last century russian scenario. And it seems more like a documentary than a videoclip, exactly what I aimed to right from the start.
Of course I added the famous stairs sequence in The Battleship Potemkin by Eisenstein, as it was what inspired me that endless scales hook in this song (the other, more romantic classical - opening and closing the track - was after listening the nth time The Carnival of Animals by my beloved Camille Saint-Saëns).
I just finished to render and upload on Youtube Intro videoclip. This time I found right tech info on HD movies. Master is in HDTV PAL 1080p (1920x1080), but I rendered it at 720p (1280x720) to follow the exact Youtube HD standard. No loss of detail as After Effects picks from same original files and redraw from scratch all frames. Rendering time about 2,5 hours. Online HD version of Intro videoclip is broadcast quality, in fact. I think this is last video I assemble with AE: it's a madness make anim sync with audio. Because you can't hear anything while scrobbling the timeline. It's a powerful tool to make single sequences with FX, but not to manage a whole project, better go for Premiere or the like.
Subject of video is swines. I like them, they're clever and it's a stupid common place they love to squelch in the dirt. Vietnamese little pigs are clean like cats. Video is an operatic dadaist inferno - where pigs are menacingly main characters. Not an happy end (as it's my favorite mood), but everybody knows what's a swine destiny (no gory images, anyway). I think also a good video introduction for a live show, to let the people get at once what's the overall climate.
Yesterday afternoon I modified last tiny details and saved master file for Thar Desert, 3rd videoclip from an Outskirt track.
This time I worked on a more ordinary videoclip concept, but I couldn’t just trace out. I recorded by a viewcam me playing Thar Desert and extracted a discreet number of frames (a nightmare cutting them out, really), then assembled again in animated sequence form.
Alberta Marchiori gave me pictures she shooted in Egypt last December, so I made a great use of them to create the environment and some absurdities (as usual).
The result is obviously grotesque as I still believe in The Residents / Frank Zappa / Pere Ubu and share at 101% their nothing-is-sacred approach.
Belief: Greed videoclip is OK, I uploaded it in Youtube Hox Vox Box channel.
I worked on a video of mine which won a couple of animation contest prizes in first 90s, called "Peyote". The strange process was 1) clean the video like it was done nowadays 2) add animation part missing and create... an aged film aspect, like it was an old documentary film. :-D Seems strage but the real video damages were very bad, the computer-generated are somewhat pleasant, they look like vintage but without destroy too much the footage.
Plot is about a peyote experience by a late 60s hippie on mexican mesa. I think is a good companion for Belief: Greed, as song and images are both dealing with psychedelic (but song is more aptly tagged as avantprog/rock in opposition).
In these days I'm doing a fierce battle with Garageband technicians to solve a problem about a double subscription. It was my fault, I made a mess between iLike and Garageband: didn't get I was wrong making artist page in iLike, and then another on Garageband... I should do that ONLY on Garageband. Then iLike build automatically a copy of info and music. I'm upset but mostly with myself.
Back to my battle, they have only to change my definitive band account from Hox Vox 2 (temporary name to permit deletion of othe band account) to Hox Vox. I can't submit songs to contests and radios as I don't want feed confusion. It's from December 12 I'm writing dozen of email, but delete a couple of letters from a name via database query seems a very hard chase to accomplish.
While I'm waiting for the miracle, I'm working on a couple of videoclips. The one for Belief: Greed is almost finished, maybe I'll close and upload tonight.
The other clip is for Thar Desert: I'm stuck with a missing camera cable, but I'm going to solve it this afternoon thanks to Cianoiz. Tomorrow morning I can work on that.
I've chosen Belief: Wrath because that anti-song (which I tag as "grindcore classical") was very apt to a sarcastic point of view about live concerts. I was always surprised how people are totally mad during them, but calm and serious just before and after. :-D
I mean, it's more noticeable than people disguised in carnival... seems like they were waiting for eons to give vent to their need of raising against normal boring lifestyle. It sound me as a clear pent-up driven expression.
While I respect it, I got the right to kid it. I used a mixed technique (die-cuts in the usual way but also 2D puppet which gives movements a gummy elasticity) so the result is very near to Terry Gilliam's (of Monthy Python) animations, it has the same "Max Ernst meets Tex Avery" taste.
Probably frenzy animation rhythm override music in itself, I mean it tends to steal the lead role; as the music is mechanical and obsessive, so it goes on the back. Not the steel snare, of course, it stick in your cranium as a nail. You can't forget it.
I think it's exactly what I wanted: a video not confortable, but funny all the same.
As I was at the end of Belief: Wrath videoclip, I opened a Youtube channel, called Hox Vox Box (a little cacophonic, but very modular so I like it).
According to the name I created a logo, a carton box with some blue (my favorite color) stars coming out. I love ochre + warm blue (with a little % of yellow in it) pairing, so I didn't spend too much time searching for right colors. That's what I like in a solo project: nobody disagree :-D.
I'll use it like a TV channel logo, superimposing it in classical position - on the right corner down.
Now the page is a little basic, with a tiled background with the name of the channel, but I think few more will be done as YouTube pages' scheme is quite rigid, with few customization possibilities. Seems like You can change box colors but not shapes, or put a texture behind a title area: just have a background, and not bigger than 256 KB).
Anyway, after a couple of days needed to make the channel start, now it's ready to fill with videos.
