I started composing this track in 2006 and put it together in its final sequence in 2010 for my Experimentum Crucis album. Then, sometime in November 2011 I happened to ask a friend if he wanted to collaborate on a music video for it using his photography skills and a day or two of shooting cityscapes.
This was the concept I e-mailed to him. Read it while playing the track.
Prime Fallacy Cha Cha – Music Video Treatment
The concept is this: the chaos of the city is actually a graceful dance of precision. The prime fallacy then is that we think it operates on random chaotic rules, when actually every machine within it is oiled to perform a precise move that can only be seen as order when you take a thousand foot view.
Thus:
- Swarms of pedestrians at a stopwalk
- Vehicle traffic jams
- Bus terminals coming in and out
- BART trains arriving on time or not
- bicyclists at top speed
- police patrolling the streets
- occupy oakland protesters camping out
—– all of it is part of a graceful ordered dance.
Hence to execute the music video is to juxtapose archived black and white footage of a ballerina or a couple dancing the cha-cha (creative commons materials, which i need to look for) with colored footage of a city that is living and breathing the dance. And the cameraman holding the camera is placing images of that dancer in random corners of the city to remind people that there is order in chaos.
[ALTERNATIVE IDEA: In fact, to be even more relevant, we could make this about Oakland, with it undergoing the Occupy movement — but that could get dangerous.]
SUGGESTED TIMING CUES
- 0:00 [drum intro] jarring images of dirty city streets
- 0:16 [ooh intro] 1st person POV: crazy people / busy people walking streets
- 0:48 [main string MELODY] archived footage of graceful dancer [black and white]
- 1:20 [synth pad instrumental] 1st person POV : walking thru city — placing image of dancer on sidewalks, windows, park benches.
- 1:52 [elec piano interlude] jarring images of city
- 2:08 [ooh MELODY] dancer + city (cut to cut)
- 2:28 [ooh intro] 1st person POV: streets , traffic, bus stations — placing image of dancer on public bus stops, train seats, street corners
- 3:00 [main string MELODY] dancer + city (cut to cut)
- 3:32 END
So what do you think? Would it make a good video?
Photo credits: “Downtown Oakland” by Hitchster and “Dancer Silhouette” by Jonathan Doe