The Window: new video and upcoming video (Patreon)

Hey! Thanks for sticking around!

Today's post is mostly about the music video I just posted on my 2nd channel. I'm also working on a more traditional math-flavored vihart video that will be out soon, so heads up! This mostly-dormant Patreon will actually collect your support on Nov 1. Thanks in advance :D

Last night I posted a music video called The Window. It was a surprise to me too. Some spoilers and Patreon-only secrets below.

Introduction:

So, this month I've found myself in a video making mood. I made a couple random videos just for myself, or friends. Things that are inside jokes or otherwise are at no risk of wanting to be shared on internet.

In the past decade, making videos has come with an increasing amount of baggage, but I've been remembering recently that I do actually enjoy it. I've made hundreds of scripted, edited videos in my life, so I've got the video making skills to be capable of hitting a creative flow and riding it from beginning to end.

So yesterday I was working on the mathy video that'll be out soon, but decided to stop at a reasonable time instead of working through the evening like I definitely would have in any year of my life before now. So what I'm saying is I was in a video making frame of mind, I gave myself free time, and anything that happens after that isn't my fault.

Ok here's a Patron-only secret:

A lot of people in the comments think this video is about mosquitos. I can see that. It works. But it is actually about midges. This spring I visited Ohio for the first time, and the airport shuttle driver gave a public service announcement that sounded like something out of a scifi novel. I had never heard of midges or midge swarms before, but apparently when the lake reaches 60 degrees in spring the entire fabric of the universe becomes midges, to the point where it is a legit hazard if you're caught by a swarm while driving. They don't bite, but they are multitudinous. They are air made flesh.

We are now on the fall side where it hits 60 degrees on the way back down, and, not the entire world becomes midges this time, which is good because I didn't want to animate that many midges. But, there are midges. They want to be in your house, where the light shines. They exist in the plural, but each one is still its own individual living being.

Ok that's the secret. Don't tell the internet, I think it's ok for them to be whatever insect or metaphor people see in them.

About the music:

The video started with the concept of a midge on the window, begging to be let inside. It started with what was intended to be the chorus, "save me." But as I started writing the lyrics and creating the story that started with the midge emerging from its larval state, I realized I didn't want a standard verse-verse-chorus format. I wanted a canon.

The first part of the song is a single voice singing through the line, with support from the guitar so that it sounds just like any regular song. You wouldn't suspect it's a canon. We have an individual story and individual voice. A single midge asking to be saved. A hero we can root for.

In the second part, the canon is revealed. The voice is one of many, and together they create a vocal swarm that is, perhaps, overwhelming by the end. I did try recording one line and then just copy and pasting with a time shift, but decided to record each individually. It's important to the concept that while every voice might seem the same and interchangeable on the surface, it is still unique and individual.

The guitar is tuned C-G-C-F-G-A. I was messing around with weird tunings for something else, and I didn't want to stress the strings by tuning it all the way back to regular just for this, so, I shifted it just slightly into something that would be easy enough to get some harmonic support from.

Writing and recording the song took 2 or 3 hours and was done entirely while lounging in bed. It was recorded directly onto my macbook pro with the built-in microphone, using Audacity. Below you can see what all the tracks looked like before I combined them and added a bit of reverb. Top is click, the next two are guitar, the rest are vocals.

About the Art:

I used jspaint.app to draw my image assets. I do love bad paint drawings, drawings that are not there to be good or beautiful but that are there to express and communicate using the empowering new tools of the digital world. There is an automatic air of nostalgia and childlike wonder.

And it is fast.

I attached the .bmp, which is too big to embed because bmp, but here's what it looks like:

The missing bit of fill in the loop of the house smoke is left on purpose, because that says mspaint.

I took screenshots, threw them into premiere, and color keyed out the white background.

You can see a couple things that didn't get used: the house by itself, and a back view of the midge. The back view was a detail I added after I'd shared the first edit with friends, just before uploading to youtube. Originally the canon started from the beginning again, but I decided I wanted the first midge to still be on the window. It's too small to really see, but I feel like it adds tension to have that midge still there on the window, still wanting to be saved, ignored while we focus on our new hero midge that is taking its first steps into the world. When I shrunk it down to put on the window it basically disappeared, so I made the chunkier version which is top left, which also basically disappears, but it is THERE, ok.

A short rant about screenshots:

I used to be a windows user, but years ago when I was at a job where everyone used macs, I discovered how much better life is when it is this easy to take partial screenshots and have them automatically saved as actual files in an easy-to-find folder, helpfully labeled by date and time. I can grab and move bits of images across apps with almost zero interruption to my creative flow. I use it to document things, to share things with friends, to make video thumbnails, to put images in blog posts, to get image assets for videos. I am now a mac user. It is worth being a mac user just for this.

Animating:

The animating is done in Premiere using keyframes on position and scale, and occasionally rotation. I've done enough of this before that I was confident that when Premiere inevitably adds weird random motion I didn't intend between my keyframes and that takes longer to get rid of than to do the entire thing again, it wouldn't matter because it's a bug and is allowed to fly erratically. So this would be something I could animate fast and stress-free.

I also made it easy for myself by making a visual canon to go with the musical one. I only needed to animate one fly, and then I could just copy, paste, timeshift. It's not a very sophisticated visual canon, because the parts don't interplay with each other in any significant way. But it made life easier.

Here's what the Premiere project looks like:

Creating and animating the visuals took about an hour and a half, and was also done while lounging in bed.

It wasn't until I'd finished it and shared it with a couple friends that I realized this was totally something I could throw onto my second channel. Just like back in the good ol' days when I used to make weird things for fun and actually share them.

In Conclusion:

sometimes these things happen.

Ok! See y'all again soon with the next video, which will be classic vihart.

🐌,

Vi