ELO - Heaven Only Knows (Cover Arrangement w/ Animation)

Music and lyrics by Jeff Lynne. Originally recorded by Electric Light Orchestra for the album "Balance of Power", released in 1986.

Guitar arrangement & performance by Ian Zalewski.
During one of our late night conversations about music, I mentioned to my friend Ian how Jeff Lynne's arrangement decisions on the "final" ELO album were sometimes puzzling. The man's primary instrument was guitar, yet a majority of the tracks seem almost devoid of any guitarwork. I asked Ian if he'd be interested in working together on a guitar-based version of "Heaven Only Knows" and a week later, 1/31/2011, he was ready to record his rendition of the song.
It was my initial suggestion to merge the alternate mix of this song (found on the recent remastered edition of the album) with the original, but in the end we only used the bridge from that version, just to switch things up a little bit.
On 2/9 I recorded the vocals, then added some bass and keys to thicken the mix five days later. I added piano on 7/27 and rerecorded some of the vocals two days later.
Ian and I met at a park in Eugene, OR to film the guitar shots on 10/13. I filmed several takes of me singing at Riverside Park in Salem a week later, but camera malfunctions caused me to scrap those in favor of my usual location for filming closeup shots.
I created the animation/sweeping colors on 11/16 just to keep up the tradition established in my previous videos.
As always, the music was made with Propellerhead Reason and Adobe Audition; the animation was made with Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro.
Grab the mp3 here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?5cu3jivvxxybb2e

I apologize for referring to Ian as Mark Tremonti at the end of the video. That was uncalled for.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Sean Moore

[elo2006]

awesome!!



[SlowNews]

I meant to put 'indie pop vibe' sorry, not 'give'...

[SlowNews]

I like your arrangement here, you bring a nice indie pop give to the song. I'm glad you stayed faithful to the original chord structure and melody! Good stuff :)