Traahn Wrote:I know you don't want to finish it (all the way to song's end) due to the limited tools, but I hope you do some day. I think it would be awesome to see where you'd go with it next.

Thanks! I'm glad to hear you would have liked to see more. Honestly, so would I.

There are two main reasons the completed video is much shorter than the actual song.

When I started this project, it was only meant to be a simple recreation of the jitter effect seen in Wang Chung's 1986 music video - to show a guy at work who had never seen their video. Of course, I had to play a little with it, so I threw in a funny stop motion dance for the music intro of the song - just me in my living room doing a ridiculous stop motion dance was the original concept of that. And for the jitter effect, a single verse and chorus should do. After all, I wasn't planning on much originally (in the imagery department) so doing more than one verse would be very boring.

It wasn't until I had my initial footage and the jitter effect completed that this simple gag video turned in to such a complex project. Those damn ideas that would haunt my head every night as I would try and fall asleep... it literally haunted me at night! So, I was forced to make this video in to something far more than the original gag video that was only meant to be shown to a few people at work and only meant to take a few days to complete.

The second main reason is because the video became very difficult to work on. I was plagued with technical difficulties and lack of proper tools to make things happen. I was also dealing with huge creative lows and the ideas that would haunt me at night would fizzle out when I tried to implement them. They would literally vanish in my mind as I would chart them out and try to bring them to life. It was the weirdest thing. There are also so many things I worked on that never made the final cut and ended up on the digital cutting room floor of oblivion for real. Many ideas and concepts I came up with were great... until I saw how they started looking and thought they were crap. It was tough not having ANY feedback at all during the entire time I was working on this. I worked in a complete vacuum on this. That didn't help either. Feedback on a work in progress is always a good thing. But there was no one I could bounce ideas off of and get objective feedback from.

I scrapped the whole thing and walked away many times before completing it. It would sit untouched for weeks at a time... but those damn ideas would gnaw at my mind as I would try and sleep, and sooner or later, I would find myself trying to capture the ideas before they fizzled out.

Honestly, I would love to complete the entire song. So many of my ideas were a little too bold for me to attempt on my own and lacking the right tools, both hardware and software, it would have taken an insane long time to complete. Working by myself was great for the creative process because I didn't have to pass any of my ideas by anyone or get told not to do this or that or whatever. And working by myself also meant that I had to do EVERYTHING. From concept, to tests (to see if concept would work), to execution, post production, doing battle on the video editor, complex timing issues, tedious clean-up work on the layers of composited images, tweaking problem areas, rendering, re-rendering, re-rendering again, and again and again and again and again and again... taking FOREVER to render just the smallest chunks of video even at low resolutions... oh man - going further with this project with the limited time I have to work on it and the conditions... I can't even think about that.

Believe it or not, I only finished the video when I did because I cut and run. I didn't really finish the video at all - not even what I had planned on doing (in the final months of it). Just before saying "screw it" and literally plopping the

Thanks, Traahn.

You really are the optimist on this one!

Unfortunately I did not shoot me lip-synching the entire song - just the first verse and chorus. If I had shot the entire thing, it would indeed leave the door open for some kind of future completion of this video. I do still have all my source files and graphics, etc. But I doubt I will do more with it in the future. But then again, one never knows.

About me looking the same in the future... well, now is the future for this project, sort of. You see, I'm a year and a half older than when I shot the video's original footage!

My how time flies!

I see the differences in my face in the mirror, but I doubt anyone would be able to tell because of the image filters I applied to my face. That look kind of hides my age marks so to say.

If you're curious as to why I didn't shoot the entire song, here's a little bit of back story on the origins and making of the video:

The project was only meant to be a quickie video to show some guys at work. It was just meant to be a short, gag video that I would not show to anyone else or put on my site. I shot the initial footage on Thursday, February 19th of 2004. Set up the camera in my living room and did some weird dance poses for the stop motion dance. I did the set up for this so quickly, I didn't focus the camera well. The entire stop motion dance of me is not clearly in focus! DOH! After spending about an hour or so on that, it was up to the spare room for the close-up lip synch portion. I propped up a green cardboard, and put a chair in front of it for me to sit in. I spent about another hour shooting that part. I just kept recording it over and over several times - just that first verse and chorus. I also kept screwing up. It had been so long since I had heard the song repeatedly (like since the 80's) that I kept screwing up the words and forgetting the exact point to start each part after the slight pauses, etc. I even screwed up the "Rip it up, move down" part incorrectly lipping the words "Crank it up" - DOUBLE-DOH! I went back and re-shot just that one verse again the next day after work. Even though I re-shot that one small part, the majority of the lip synching was very sloppy, not to mention I did screw up another word. I lipped "don't hang me on the party line" but the actual lyric is "don't hang me on the border line". SON-OF-A-DOH! I didn't care to correct that. Why should I? It was just going to be a quickie project and only a few people would ever see it. Or so I thought that was the plan at the time.

Working on the video, I usually didn't spend too much time each day on it. My work schedule was only about an hour or two per day. I would do as much as I could within that time, which usually wasn't very much. The time restriction was because I have very little "free" time each day, so that was all I could do. There were days that I worked on it for three or four hours straight, usually on the weekends, but for some reason, I generally worked on it much more during the work week than I did on the weekends - probably because I needed to just relax on the weekends. I also didn't work on it every day, or even every week. There were huge gaps in which I would literally not touch the project in any way, shape, or form for weeks at a time. I remember when I bought TRON 2.0 in May of 2004, I didn't touch the project for about a month! I was hooked on TRON and frustrated with the project. I spent a lot of time being frustrated with the project, which is why I would go for long durations without touching it. Of course, those nasty little mental images and ideas would run around in my head at night, so I would always seem to find my way back to the project eventually.

Even though this project was a complete pain in the ass to work on, I have to admit I didn't totally hate the experience. In a strange way, as frustrat

Very nice indeed.



Did I catch a bit of New Order inspired imagery in there? With the on-beat, turn-taking, face-slapping illustration models?

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Fantasticly interesting!



And yes, those are the two slappy happy dudes.

I could never forget that video. Back in the club days, after getting adequately hammered, my brother and I were known to reenact that when the the song came on (*sigh* carefree days, eh?) To us, it's an iconic 80's image. How could I NOT recognize it in your video?

And I still love New Order and Electronic.



Anyway, glad to have helped dig up a deeper understanding in your own creation.

Wouldn't that have been more rolling upper cuts targeting the chin instead of open-palm slaps to the cheek?