This video is part of a game that a bunch of us are playing this month. The idea is that each day, someone different makes a 90 second video, inspired in some way by the previous day’s piece. This video was inspired by Heath’s video and tomorrow Mike will make one somehow based on this one. I’m collecting all the videos over here.
In case you’re interested, here’s the chain of though that led to this video. I started by writing down some things that interested me in Heath’s video. One of those was the closeup of his eyes. That made me think of the scene in 2001 where David Bowman goes into the monolith. I’ve been listening to The Flaming Lips a lot lately and I thought the end of Silver Trembling Hands and the beginning of Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast would make a cool alternate soundtrack. My original idea was to have Aren (the robot from Talkbot.tv) just say something funny at the end but I’d been listening to the Glee soundtrack all day and I thought it would be better if I could somehow work in one of those tracks. The best one is their version of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing which, I realized, is the song that they used in the last scene of The Sopranos. And that fits perfectly with the Walt Whitman poem that Heath used. All of that happened in my head in about a minute after not coming up with an idea all day.
Update 11/20/09: I finally implemented Ogg video on my site in the new HTML5 video tag. If you are using Firefox 3.5 you’ll get the ogg video when you click play. If you are using Safari or Chrome you’ll get an mp4 file and if you are using IE6, 7 or 8 you’ll get a flash player. I’m using javascript to replace the thumbnail image with the video player because the poster image attribute isn’t supported yet. Also having the image displayed first makes it look better on my iPhone. 
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6 Comments
You are such a madman, Verdi. I had one of those issues recently, had a deadline and nothing would gel, then it all formed in my head in a flash with only a little time left for execution. My end result worked out well, I just wish I had a little longer to refine. Thanks for the trip into your flaming pink brain – I like knowing something about your influences and though process. Can’t wait to see what Sizemore does!
Spectacular!
And it’s like the What Happened Next, after the AI apocalypse at the end of Talkbot.
Or it Aren’s dream?
Do Androids Dream of Virtual Stargates?
Oh this is my dream and is totally outside the cannon of Talkbot videos.
Oh, nice Victrola like my Pathe. Still waiting on an idea to use that great musical prop.
Flaming Lips is a band I should explore more.
very cool michael, I liked how you went through your thought process as well, lord knows I don’t know what I am thinking most of the time…..
The ogg played great from here. Your site is so very nice.