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.

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.

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.