Funk Bot

I made tons of loops and short "songs" like this one around 1999-2002.  All the voices (but the laughter and "yeah," which I stole from the web) are synthetic, driven from a program I wrote.  The music comes from a few sources, and most everything has been massaged; e.g., the "clucking" comes from the laughter.  Lyrics start below the player.

Get up off of that thing
dance and you'll feel better
Break it up, break it up
break it down, break it down
Just let your self go
and let the spirit flow
[...laughter...]
[...laughter...]
Show respect
and clear the deck
Then you can hear
my smooth talking
That gets
your body rocking
Till the ground starts shaking
and there is no faking
The fact that
you've got the feeling
You've got the feeling, baby

As you can see, I nearly broke my brain coming up with original lyrics.  And while it's not Sinatra, Dylan or Snoop Dogg, for software robots reading from a script, I think the voices' phrasing is pretty tight.

Elevator Music

The bloody video comes from Kubrick's The Shining; if you are going to steal footage, steal from the best.  The (George Bush Jr.) twins are from some googled image I modified.  The music comes from the movie and a few other things I modified.  The "inspiration" for this was "How'd You Come To Orakulate So Good?" in Corrected Works, linked to from here.

It's been one of my favorite loops to listen to when I'm trying to concentrate.

Tremendous Days

In honor of the Easter bunny, a cartoon I did back in 2001 or so.

It uses agent cartoon characters.  I recorded the preacher video background (including the subtitles at the bottom) from my TV, with my first crude webcam.  The audio background is synthesized (agent) voices, and other stuff I resurrected and reformed.

No Salesman

A few years ago I thought videos like this were the most promising way to explore my interests.  I enjoyed coming up with bits of music and video; I liked writing bits of "poetic" prose; all I had to do was put them together.

But the problem is, I'm not a storyteller.  I'm always impressed by people -- like movie directors and novelists -- who can keep track of the parts of a story, and imagine how they all fit together.

At any rate, this is from year 2000.  Avid TV watchers may recognize the source: a series of Las Vegas car dealer commercials.  I found it on the web before it broke out on cable.  One idea I picked up watching art videos that sample great movies is: it's easier to make something good if you start with something great.

Passion of the Torture 2

I went back and improved the video I mentioned earlier enough to show it here.  The yellow tint makes a difference for me; the color in the original was too cold and creepy, like a fresh knife wound.

In Mel Gibson's World, pain is love.  And he loves seeing Jesus in pain.

I think this was doomed from the beginning.  I wanted to show the unrelenting nature of Mel's blood lust, so I sped through a lot of quantity, and jerky samples are irritating to watch.  But I wasn't going to pick through his footage and build a different story, and couldn't take a slow, close look without getting knee-deep in his sadistic glee.

A lot of (most?) ideas sound better than they turn out.  E.g., another movie idea I tested, of It's a Wonderful Life at 32x speed, did not feel at all like a life flashing before your eyes...

The Making of One Man's Plans Video

I've mentioned before that my videos are made with a program I wrote that uses the same agent technology as the Help Assistant paper clip in Microsoft applications.  Later on I used it for everything but the visible cartoon characters, but in the beginning I was really fond of them (L to R here: Cristal, Genie and E-Woman).

The words in this video are from a piece of short fiction I wrote titled One Man's Plans (in Corrected Works, linked to from here)  Note how the synthetic voice can barely keep up with the words, unfortunately making the vocal more irritating than it should be.  All the characters' movements are choreographed and synchronized by the program.

The music is from a few loops I bent, folded and mutilated; the "guitar" is from some Central Asian folk music that sounds nothing like this.

I can't believe how much work I put into the program behind this; luckily I've gotten a lot of use from it over the past 5 or 6 years.  Nowadays people can make movies a lot more easily by doing "machinima" -- recording action from a high-end video game, then dubbing in the voices.  But in 2000, it was hard to record the screen, much less stage a scene.

Paint

This is yet another one of my videos that "just sits there," even though I am moving furiously inside it.  The subtitles and music are fuzzier here than in the original.

Talking

I've said nasty things about the videos I've made; this is one of the more recent ones.  My comments usually boil down to: "they just sit there," and don't supply the visual interest viewers expect.

I think of them as video poems -- where the subtitles are the star -- and maybe that's where I go wrong: the whole idea of having to pay close attention to text over a video background is silly.  Even the (vaguely similar in technique) "Deep Thoughts" bits on Saturday Night Live had more of the standard values -- like a human voice reading along, some camera movement and scene transitions -- that suggest an active view.

I make these things with a program I wrote that plays sound and video files, and drives software character agents according to a screenplay I feed it.  The subtitles here are the word balloons of an invisible narrator.

The video clips used above are from a fast food commercial, an old movie, a crude webcam video I took of gas storage tanks being imploded in Brooklyn, and another one of the Union Square subway station.

Audio Loops

I wasted even more time bending, folding and mutilating audio into bits than I wasted on animations/video.  The bits were all intended to be looped, and could be played on multiple players going at once (which could in turn be recorded).  The names of files reveal some sources, and there's no good reason to reveal them here.

One thing I really enjoyed was distorting bits with software utilities that came with SoundBlaster audio cards.  I could nearly see the "alien" voices spawned from harsh treble, reverb and other distortions -- still some of my best, most intense memories.