Posts Tagged JoCo

A video, full of sound and light, signifying Christmas

Last weekend I was on my way to a concert in Lausanne when I came across a building with a light show projected onto it. I stopped to film it in high resolution with my fancy new camera. Later I added appropriate music to the different scenes, to make it a bit more interesting. Here is the result:

Most of this music is explicitly released under a Creative Commons license, and most can be downloaded for free (there are links below), and most comes from artists who generally don’t mind people using their music and don’t have labels that are likely to sue me, but there are a few tracks I didn’t make 100% sure I was allowed to use, so I hope those artists don’t mind being included.

I tried to include as many different artists as possible so that people will discover someone new. The only ones I used twice are Jonathan Coulton (well, he only got a short bit at the beginning) Jonathan Mann (I planned from the beginning to use Penguins Having a Party, not suspecting that he’d written a song in which he said ‘building’ over and over, which is the perfect space-filler in a video of a building) and The Cow Exchange (I had many possibilities for the last song, but this one followed better musically from the one before it.)

I did this fairly quickly, to get it ready by Christmas, so most of the time I just searched my music library for keywords relating to a scene and picked the first song I found that seemed to fit. There may be better matches in songs which don’t happen to have the right keywords in the title, or which I don’t have yet, or which I ignored because I didn’t know what the artist’s or their label’s policy on reuse was.

You can get most of the songs for free, but I encourage you to support the artists if you can, and if you like what they do, of course. The songs are: Read the rest of this entry »

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If I Made Adverts for Hair Gel, Part Two

This is a mash-up of my first ad for hair gel and the picture Len drew for my video about Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week project. I imagine that the two parts would be on sequential odd-numbered pages.

Becoming super, the hard way: write a song a week for a year. The easy way: use Generic™ Brand hair gel

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Video: Anniversary Cards Redux

Do you remember Anniversary Cards, in which I wrote a ‘Roses are Red’-style poem for each of the songs Jonathan Coulton wrote for his Thing a Week project? Well, recently Jonathan ran a Thing a Week Redux in which he reposted each of the Thing a Week blog entries five years after the original, with some new commentary. Just like during the original Thing a Week, I didn’t get around to reading it very often. However, as I was catching up with it around five weeks from the end, I got the idea of revisiting those Roses are Red rhymes and turning them into a video to celebrate the end of Thing a Week Redux. I didn’t get it done in time, so I saved it for Jonathan’s birthday (December 1) instead. Here’s the video:

That was not specifically made for his birthday, but this other video I was involved with (mostly on ridiculous percussion that didn’t make the cut, and robot choir in the final few verses) was:

It’s based on A Talk With George, which Jonathan has said was his favourite Thing a Week, and rewritten, sung, strummed, mixed, filmed and cut by the great people on Jonathan Coulton’s forums, most of which I have met or will meet in real life at concerts in the UK or on JoCo Cruise Crazy.

And now back to overexplaining the first video.

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Video: Jonathan Coulton’s Sentient Beard (and how to defeat it)

Here is a video I made using some of my footage from the quiz show on the first JoCo Cruise CrazyJonathan Coulton’s first concert in Amsterdam and a tour of Gruyères I took in February, and a song about moustaches from an audio recording of a Jonathan Coulton concert. It explains my ulterior motive for wanting The Bearded One to come to Switzerland.

I had the idea for this during the tour, as soon as I heard about Chupia Barba, but I only got around to editing together the video today. I’m on holiday from work for the next two weeks, but with no particular travel plans, so I’m hoping to finish many of the creative projects I’ve started, and perhaps even post one every weekday. I’m going to put these posts into a ‘Holiday Highlights’ category, out of nostalgia for primary school when we always had to write a ‘Holiday Highlights’ story at the beginning of a new term. I promise they won’t all be about Jonathan Coulton, or beards.

If you do like Jonathan Coulton, though, you might like the videos I took of the other concerts I went to recently, in Bristol, Manchester and London. Also, booking for JoCo Cruise Crazy II is open, although not all the entertainers have been announced yet. It’s not going to Jamaica, so you really have no reason not to go. Here are some reasons to go from the aforementioned concert recordings.

If you prefer maths, and particularly overhyped constants such as pi, you might like that this video is 3:14:15 long.

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Get your own Mac to sing Still Alive

Somebody on Twitter mentioned he’d like the file I used to get my Mac to sing Still Alive, so here it is. If you have a Mac, you just need to open this in any application which can view text (TextEdit, for example) go to the Edit menu, Speech submenu, and select ‘Start Speaking’. You can try different voices by changing the system voice in the Speech pane in the System Preferences. For best results, use a high quality voice such as Vicki or Victoria. Alex is supposed to be the highest-quality, but it’s a male voice, and I don’t think I’ve tried it. Voices that already have their own built-in tunes (such as Good News and Bad News) won’t work. You could also create a sound file of it using the ‘Text to Audio File’ Automator action.

It won’t sound exactly like the recording in the video I made, because I edited the resulting sound file in GarageBand to get the timing to match up with the original song. If you want to shortcut all that, or if you don’t use a Mac, you can get your computer to sing (or lip-synch?) Still Alive by downloading this mp3.

This file is released under a PleaseDon’tSueMeValve-Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which is explained in detail in the file itself.

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