When culture gets overinflated, yet refuses to pop, I want to be there with the needle. Enlightened cynics of the world unite! Express your love or hatred of things from the sacred to the mundane.
Here are some of my choices of television scenes where I thought music was used in a particularly inventive fashion. If you have others, please drop the links into the comments or just recall them from memory. Hope you enjoy these!
Beatles - All You Need Is Love - The Prisoner
Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms - West Wing
Blu from www.blublu.org has done some incredible time lapse/real world animations over the past few years. I remember watching That's Incredible when I was a kid and seeing the epic domino runs thinking about how much time it must have taken. Then I saw some of the videos for OK Go and thought the same thing. For me, Blu takes it to an entirely new level.
Kudos to the execution of an amazing Combo.
Since I was a kid, I always thought timelapse and stop motion videos were cool. I'll never forget, a bit older, seeing "The Grid" section of the film Koyaanisqatsi for the first time and being blown away by a 24 hour cycle in 10 minutes with the magical repetition of Philip Glass behind it.
Vimeo has an entire section of these types of videos and I encourage you to check some of them out. Here are a few of my favourites upon a very short scan of a scant few of over 500 pages in this category alone:
An absolutely elegant and beautiful selection from nfb.ca. This is like a gentle version of something one might have seen in Koyanisqaatsi series a couple of decades ago. Best part is, you don't have to be Canadian to appreciate the simplicity and juxtaposition of images and sound.
"This film depicts 24 hours in the life of an imagined city – a composite that draws on all Canadian cities. This imaginary day unfolds through the course of four seasons and reveals the nature of places and the people that make them so vibrant. The images in the film slowly come together with deft, impressionistic touches. Adopting the rhythm of someone strolling through the city, they intermingle and reply to each other – evoking a different story for each viewer." - nfb.ca
I've been a fan of the band Phish for well over a decade. They're a band whose popularity was the end result of social media even before the phrase became de rigeur. By allowing free recording of their shows and never repeating setlists, BBS news would spread every night of songs played, and within 24 hours, entire shows for free download would appear on FTP sites. The Phish newsgroups sometimes had 1000 posts a day and people used the web to arrange cassette and eventually CD trading vines.
After hundreds of shows and over 25 years, the band still has not lost its sense of humor or its ability to gravitate to an internet crowd. That they appreciate the need to advertise an upcoming tour on the web is, I suppose, expected. That they can find a way to do it that makes me smile and glad that I've already got tickets is a bonus.
Here's to a band that is willing to put money out for a fan base that is committed and will follow the band wherever they go. A band that's never had a song on the charts or a music video of note.
I applaud the effort. I love the cheekiness. I know that as long as a quarter-century old band can continue to be this creative, they will keep drawing new fans to shows. And isn't that a big part of what social and new media are all about?
I just love that a simple premise can be expressed in a short time frame with such elegance. Give this short animated film under a minute and it will make you smile a little inside... which may hurt... if you have scar tissue... or no soul.
When you only have two minutes between phone calls or sitcoms, give speed cinema a try. You can watch 2001 by Stanley Kubrick at 1000x the speed in less than 2 minutes. You may have to be fast on the popcorn though.
