LIVING IN THE FUTURE is fantastic. When I was a wee child growing up in the wilds of The Heights neighborhood in Jersey City, my brother Yan and I had outsize ambitions when it came to creativity and self-entertainment. I’ve written about some of our weird childhood projects on this blog before, and what’s amazing about them to Adult Jeff is how much effort they required just for the raw materials. When we constructed elaborate Star Wars-themed photosets complete with captions and blaster shots added via markers, we had to first assemble a world-class collection of Star Wars action figures, then we had to take a few dozen posed photos with them, get those photos developed, add in our ‘special effects’, write the story to go along with the photos, then mount them to paper, then force our poor, beleaguered parents to pretend to care about it, since they were our only audience.
Yan and I had a very slight interest in film-making; we lacked any real drive for it, and the tools were beyond the reach of our allowances. We never had a camera of any kind, or any training, but we always liked the idea of making films or animations. Back then, it was impossible. Today, my friends, we have stock video.
Building a Mystery
I’ve been obsessed with the idea of creating a visual narrative using stock video for years. In fact, I used to make some money off the concept by making book trailers for myself and my fellow authors. I like the challenge of the concept, the constraint. I don’t have direct control over the clips — the lighting, the actors, the style, or even how many there are featuring the same people and places. Trying to create something coherent and interesting with whatever you can find in the stock bins is, frankly, kind of fun.
I’m also an amateur musician, and I’ve invented a fake rock band called The Levon Sobieski Domination to release my music through. A few years ago, I tried my hand at creating a music video using a mix of stock and shots I created using my phone at home:
Not exactly a cinematic masterpiece, but you get the idea. I came to realize that the mix of slick stock video and my own shaky-cam clips didn’t work, so when I returned to the concept last year, I stuck to stock video:
That turned out better. Recently, I’ve returned to the concept with a vengeance simply because it’s fun for me. I love finding a few dozen stock clips and trying to set a mood or tell a story of some sort with them. Here are three video I made in the last few weeks for songs I’m releasing:
“Rearview”
This one’s a mood, not a story and was basically inspired when I realized the surprising amount of cinematic stock video there is of ballerinas.
“Day Drank”
A song from the upcoming release, this video tells a pretty loose story that’s entirely on brand, I think. It started with a clip of business folks dancing in their office, and I took it in the most ridiculous direction possible.
“Riding My Own Melt”
This one was a bit more of a challenge; once you go beyond ‘mood’ or incredibly broad narrative like “unhappy workers get day drunk and start dancing” it gets more difficult to tell a story of any kind. But in the end I think this pulled together nicely.
It’s fun to work on a creative project that has nothing tied to it. Whether anyone watches these videos or listens to these songs doesn’t matter: What matters is I had fun making them. And maybe you had fun watching them! Since science has yet to discover the discouragement that can deter me from unleashing such things on the world, I’ll very likely keep making these. You’ve been warned.