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SF Weekly Painting and Video

NOVEMBER 3, 2010
Wounded Pride Cover | 10.5"x13" | Acrylic and Ink
I write here completely robbed of sleep but this has turned out to be an interesting few days.  Andrew Nilsen, art director at SF Weekly called to do a cover for a feature story about issues around gay teens in the San Francisco area.

As I started the painting, I decided for fun, I would film myself doing the painting and mess around with time-lapse and see what it looked like.  I've always enjoyed watching artists paint and have a pretty decent collection of artists working so I thought I could use it in a presentation or something when I teach at school.  I've also been wanting to mess around with video for a while anyway.  Back when I was in a band in the late 80's-early 90's I did our 'videos' and archived our live shows using VHS players doing all the mixing and editing through them in a very lo-fi sort of way.  Today's technology is way above that and have been 'geeked' up for a while to see what I can do with it.  I mentioned what I was doing to Andrew on Monday about the video and he jumped on board to get the video posted on the SF Weekly website.
The art I did for Monday's deadline was hitting the streets on Wednesday (today) and the website had the article up Tuesday night.  With this sort of timing, it became pretty imperative that I get the video done as soon as I could so that it was on the site while the paper is out on the street.  There was one issue...I never used After Effects before and somehow had to make a 6 minute film with still images, edit about 10 hours of video and figure out a sound track.

So with very little video editing experience but with some general knowledge of Adobe products and some common sense...and super patient help from Kristina to help figure this out and finish it when my eyes started to cross, we pulled the video together.  Seeing the result, I wish I filmed it larger than 420x340 so it wouldn't blur out as it has but I wasn't thinking that this would end up being used for anything other than my own amusement.
While I was scrambling last night putting this video together I considered doing a 'commentary' over the film or have some kind of soundtrack.  I decided that a soundtrack would be much better and just let the film and art speak for itself.

Living up here in Boston now for the last year, I've been going to Sinti Rhythm shows.  They are a great bunch of guys especially Drawger's very own Robert Saunders who recently just put up a post about their new record which came out recently.  I thought they would be great for the soundtrack I and called Robert last night to see if they would let me use the recording of 'My Melancholy Baby' and the whole band was cool with it.

As I was thinking about the music and how it related to the video, I liked the Yin and Yang of it.  The art I was making is a pretty heavy topic but the video sped up made it sort of jerky and I'll use the word 'spunky', in a way.  The title of the song, 'My Melancholy Baby' you'd figure it would be a slower minor chord sort of song but its sort of the polar opposite of that.  Upbeat and in major chords.  I thought the combination would work well here.

The whole project fell together nicely.  I had a great time working with Andrew making the art and had a completely frenetic and sleep deprived experience putting this video together.

I hope you enjoy it.
Wounded Pride | 10.5"x13" | Acrylic and Ink
© 2024 Scott Bakal