After I posted about the Griff music sequencer I had a drive to learn some actual music production, mostly because I thought it might be a fun and challenging activity and maybe I’d be able to find a nice creative outlet. I had tried once or twice in the past to take up some kind of digital music stuff with little success, but as I’ve been doing a lot of new things lately and learning how to learn better, I managed to stick to it for a week and get past the initial learning curve of REAPER(my DAW of choice, not open source but they do have a very user friendly trial) I found myself having a lot of fun and managed to make a couple things that at the very least, I found interesting.

So naturally I’ve bounced off that with a lot of optimism for learning another thing I’ve wanted to learn but was intimidated/lacking the focus to pick up, Video editing. I remember watching this YouTube video about Steven Soderbergh and some projects he posted to his website where he took existing movies and edited them down or changed them up in order to make something new and revealing. Like in the YouTube video, he goes into detail about how he removed all the audio from Raiders of he Lost Ark, replaced it with Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s scores for The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo respectively, and made it black in white in order to study Spielberg’s use of blocking and camera movement.

I wasn’t going to do anything as intelligent or cool as that but I did have one idea that, at least for myself, I wanted to see. Recently I watched Playtime and I loved it and I will definitely be watching more of Tati’s movies. I also watched 28 Days Later twice and 28 Years later in the cinema a week or two before watching Playtime. So in the sharp thematic left turn my brain lost traction and the two movies crashed into each other to form some kind of dystopian French nightmare. A man becomes increasingly lost in pursuit of some kind of anonymous business deal in a hall of mirrors style office building, seemingly identical to pretty much every other building in Paris. only in the reflections of glass doors and walls do we get glimpses of the mental ideal of the city of love. The Eiffel tower or the Champs Elysees seen for a split second before we’re running down another corridor or whisked away with the group to some prescription tourism.

So in order to make this masterpiece much worse I started with looking for some software. The first thing I tried worked well enough for what I wanted to do so I stuck with Kdenlive, my only issue was with it being a bit jumpy when previewing cuts but that’s probably just due to my hardware. I went through cutting little bits out, just trying to make the scenes a bit faster pace and also removing some shots completely so I could fit it to the music a better. For the two beats I decided I wanted synced, when the drums come in first and the fade out, I just couldn’t get them to work without adding some extra music. So I (quite poorly) cut and looped the music track in Kdenlive. I could have done a better job by exporting the rough track to REAPER and fixing it there, but I would have just got caught up on that instead of learning more about cutting the video.

After a couple hours of messing around and reading little bits here and there, I think I got it to somewhere that I was happy with, at least as a day one kind of project. I did go and mess with some effects, adding a strong glow and changing the saturation to compensate. I’m not so sure about that. But I do love that glow you see sometimes in older movies and TV. A mist filter? I’ve seen some people say it’s to do with film or lighting but I’m not sure what it is specifically.

Anyways, thanks for reading, I’ll for sure be butchering more masterpieces in the near future, so that’s good :)

p.s. working on a good way to share the video. I’ll update this when I figure it out