Purple
There is a painter whose daughter is a jazz musicians. His favorite color is purple, so as a surprise she composed a piece of music and gave it the title Purple. The photo above is one of her albums (a jazz trio with an 80 piece symphonic orchestra) and one of her father's paintings was used for the cover.
She happens to be one of my favorite musicians, so back in 2006 I setup a YouTube channel, Hans1970, to showcase her extraordinary talent, and used her father's name to honor all he did to cultivate her talent and career.
It was an amazing success, over 5 million views so far, and if you search YouTube for "jazz, Hammond B3 organ" five of the top ten videos, including the number 1 video, are from this channel. The musician is of course Barbara Dennerlein. In a way, Hans and I are connected by the Change of Pace album, he did the cover, and I did the translation of the liner notes for the English version.
I am also a fan of Hans Dennerlein's artwork you can view it here, so in 2009 I decided to surprise him and Barbara by doing a music video of the song Purple. It was an incredibly complex undertaking for a hobby video fan, but I tried to evoke the feeling his art engendered in me, and of course emphasize the color purple.
Remember, back then YouTube limited videos to a maximum of 10 minutes, and they also had a very limited file size. As a result, I was only able to upload a low resolution version -- very frustrating when I think back to the time and effort that went into this. (Another frustration, after finally getting a fairly good command of that video software, it is no longer compatible with Windows 10.)
But in any case, yesterday my artist friend @shortcut and I were talking about music videos and as a result this morning I want to share my video with you. It will frustrate fellow music geeks because it doesn't showcase the musicians, but now that you have the backstory I hope you will enjoy it (might help if you try to imagine it in a higher resolution ;-)
"Purple" by Barbara Dennerlein, organ, with Mitch Watkins, guitar, Dennis Chambers, drums, Andy Sheppard, sax
Morgenseiten is a tag created by @shortcut for morning stream of consciousness posts.
Photo: Barbara Dennerlein's album cover "Change of Pace"
Wow! This is really a cool video (and a beautiful song). I'm loving it!
Did you animate those shapes into a loop and then add a kaleidoscope effect and different coloring? Which editing software did you use?
I've been busy the whole day re-editing my first music video. It's so time consuming (especially, when you want to get it right). Going to write a post about it soon.
Thanks! As I watched this today I was wondering myself how in the world I did it. I think that was so long ago that I was using Windows XP. At that time, when new video suites would come out, I would buy the previous versions from Pearl.de for a tiny fraction of the cost. So I was using 3 or 4 different programs on that video. Nero was one of them, but I can't remember the others for sure.
It took hours to render it, then I would use that video in another program, adding layers. Then hours again... I used so many filters, I couldn't do it again even if my life depended on it ;-) I remember there were a lot of limitations. I would have liked to have taken the opacity of the kaleidoscope down so that the musicians were more visible, but lots of my wishes simply weren't possible. But at least it came close to the feel I was after.
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to you video -- man you are so right, video takes forever!!!!!
Yay, knowing about the process commands me even more respect ;-) Really well done and the > 30,000 views at youtube are fantastic. These days video editing has become a lot more user friendly and affordable, but it is still a science on it's own...
Thanks for your kind word, and coming for a profi that means a lot. This was a good place to present it, because I could share the backstory. This particularly video was more about the art/inspiration for the song, and not about the musicians. I completely understand music fans who were disappointed or frustrated because of that. After all, they came to the video to see the musician. Actually, the 30k views aren't too good, but I completely understand that. Around the same time I did another video which did much better, I'll share another time.
Like you, I've kind of moved on from video a bit. But you're right, and not only is the software better, but the computing power, storage, and transfer speeds are so much better.
Read my profile if want me to resteem your post to over 72,500 followers. @a-0-0