Chant
Another Sunday, another video. I’ve decided, for the time being, to keep a similar production and release cadence to my brother’s posts of old material, until February begins, when the plan is to speed up.
It’s another mostly-electronic instrumental that I recorded on OP-1 in 2021 or 2022, did a few mixes of and then decided it didn’t have enough going on to be viable. But in November last year, I got the idea of making an animated video for it. This is not that video! Because animation is hard and time-consuming and it’s going to take a little longer for me to get there. I am, however, working on it, and designing characters and settings, in-between all my other projects.
Recorded on OP-1 with built-in presets (the fake koto sound), third-party patches from OP1.fun (the live drums) and sampled MicroFreak sounds that I made myself (the drone and the chanted voices). Drum parts were fingerdrummed and unquantized; what with the track sounding like some sort of procession, in which the drumming wouldn’t be all that precise, I decided to embrace the slop. This was a bit of a problem when I made the mix for this video, decided to add bass and guitar to it, and cursed myself for allowing the drums to be that sloppy. I also doubled up the MicroFreak and added one extra sample at the end to give it a little more kick. I wonder if anyone will recognize it.
The original mix reminded several people, including myself, of the self-flagellating monks from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so naturally I wanted to reference that in the art. On the animation end, that quickly evolved to the monks hitting each other with their wooden boards, instead of themselves. On the character design end, as mentioned before, I had my brother’s postings of old The Hooded Crow tracks on my mind, so when I was struggling with creating eye-catching designs that worked with the monks’ robes, I naturally returned to the old idea of crows that are literally hooded. I included some of my preparatory drawings in the video.
The track was mixed in GarageBand; the video was made using iMovie. The reason I’m using these tools is because I’m a complete simpleton, but also because I can be sure that I will be able to work on any Apple product that I happen to have in front of me (I have mostly stopped using third party plugins in GarageBand for that same reason - give me a consistent setup between systems any day of the week). However, after making only two videos in iMovie, it’s clear to me that iMovie and GarageBand are not of the same caliber. While both programs are a good way for people to get started, GarageBand is very versatile and allows users to keep discovering features. It grows with the user’s experience level. This is not the case with iMovie, which is very limited and often behaves in ways that are contrary to what a GarageBand user has learned to expect. I may have to use something different with more of a learning curve, and if so, it probably pays to make the switch sooner rather than later.
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