Easter Colour Mix

Sometimes, things go pear-shaped, and sometimes, things happen in pairs. (Ask Erik Satie about pear-shaped. After all, he wrote "Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear.") I had just finished "City Night Rain," the previous video on this site, when, on Easter morning, I was sitting at Cliffy's Cafe in Daylesford, Vic, watching people passing on the sidewalk. I noticed that my cellphone could take pictures tinted red, green or blue, so I filmed 30 seconds of passing people on the sidewalk in each colour. At home, i loaded the videos to my computer, and stretched both the videos and the soundtracks, and made a music track as well, then mixed them all together in such a way that the balance of red, green and blue was constantly changing. Although my original idea was inspired by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill's "Three Colour Separation" film series, I realized that my mix was more about changing colour balances than about reassembling a sense of realistic colour. The result is a sort of daytime companion to the nightscape of City Night Rain. The piece sort of "wrote itself." That is, it just fell together, but I'm really happy with the results. I think these two video works turn out to be sections of a larger work, yet to be conceived. To me at least, they seem to suggest that. For the moment though, I'm happy with them as a pair of mood pieces. And for those of you into such things, the electric piano track is a jazz chord progression retuned into a just-intonation scale based on a Fibonacci-like additive series. There are two tracks of electric piano, in the rhythmic ratio of 84:87, with the two tracks approximately a minor third (6:5) apart.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Computer
• music;
• video
• art;
• process
• three
• colour
• separations;
• electronic
• just
• intonation;
• microtonality;
• sound
• stretching;
• time
• dilation
• studies