Much like everyone else I’ve ever met, my favourite scene in any music video is when you refused to respond to a spreadsheet text. Then I thought, “I know how to use Excel too, pivot tables and macros and arrays, oh my!” So I figured I could make some music videos of my own. I started with part of a This Will Destroy You track, and it went very well. Now I’m bursting at the seams to make more. Here’s a few I have in the pocket, for when a cool dude propositions me for one and needs it pronto.
- A yearlong video of a 6.08333-minute song, with 1 second recorded every day, probably in a stop-motion way but not just someone’s face like in those youtubies where you watch someone get older right before your eyes.
- Instead of instruments, the musicians play other objects BUT they don’t even realize it! Like the guitarist is playing a broom and the drummer is hitting a bunch of mulch and such. In an interesting turn, towards the end there’s a custodian sweeping the floor with a… GUITAR! Also, the mic is probably a peeled banana wearing a clown’s nose.
- An orchestra conductor conducts the song while staring directly at the camera the whole time. I’ll try to get Bramwell Tovey on board too, since he’s half bored these days.
- There’s one for one of my tunes, A Slightly More Complicated Desultory Philippic (or How I was Sharpshooter’d Into Submission), where I dress up as each person that I say I am and make a really short video where I try to be as still as possible.
- I’ll be doing a bad lip reading video at some point, taking scenes from movies and matching their words up with the song lyrics, but that requires patience, so this one might not get done until I’m old and great.
- I bet one that’ll be fun to shoot is me putting on a song I really like for someone, and the whole time it plays I stare at them all attentive but like too attentive so it makes it hard for the person and subsequently the watcher to actually enjoy the song they’re hearing for the first time.
- For an abstract instrumental track, it’ll just be one person sitting alone doing a song drawing as they listen along.
There’s a few live music video ideas I have in my arsenal too, in case the cool dude wants one of those instead.
- One is a bootleg video taken by someone in the crowd with a substandard phone camera, but somehow it has professional quality live audio. That’ll mess with ’em, hey?
- Another bootleggy one starts with the point-of-view of a crowd member, but at some point someone else in front of them puts up their phone and starts recording too. The rest of the video is the first phone focused on the second phone.
- Then there’s one where each band member is in a different location, being filmed at the same time as they play along with each other using innards or something so that they know when to play the right notes.
I left one out, mainly because it’s partially finished and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give anything about it away before the finished product, but I can’t keep it to myself any longer. It’s a video for Hoop Dancer which is from my own perspective on my former back patio on a sunny day. I scan the sky and trees and air and other surroundings when a few birds fly by and start dancing. Slight hallucinations morph those dancers into god knows what, but then I snap out of it a little and the real world returns. But only for a minute. Then it’s back to weird, entertaining stuffs, like laughing people, following some spirit guides around, increasing in psychedelia until the very end when I get sucked into the vortex I was just looking at. Yeah, that one.