Do you make videos? Do you display them on Youtube? If you do, submit them to the h2g2 Post. We are ardent cineastes! (Watching movies is an excuse to eat more popcorn.)

As I mentioned in a recent Entry I like to make videos for YouTube occasionally and my inspiration is a line from the song 'Left to my own devices' by the Pet Shop Boys: 'Che Guevara and Debussy to a Disco Beat' as I enjoy playing classical music themes on my Yamaha electronic keyboard accompanied by Disco Beats¹ from the integral rhythm library. However, like the keyboardmeister Dmitri, I don't just restrict my playing to classical tunes. In particular Pet Shop Boys songs often lend themselves well to being arranged for my keyboard.

To test what my movie making software (Adobe Premiere) could do, I chose the song 'Rent'. This was because it contains a repetitive verse and chorus structure that would enable me to use the same slice of my early video footage² to compare different effects.

In some ways Premiere is much more powerful than ye olde MovieMaker that I used to have in Windows Vista (eg it can separate the audio from a video so that I can manipulate the sound and vision separately), but in other ways it is incredibly feeble when compared with MovieMaker (eg instead of applying colour effects frame by frame, it just changed all the frames to the same colour, which made for a very drab effect compared to the psychedelia that Dmitri can generate).

So, my experiment was not very successful in the sense that I wasn't able to create the effects I had in mind, but nevertheless I present to you the video for my arrangement of 'Rent' by the Pet Shop Boys.

Join the Q Archive

SashaQ

16.04.18 Front Page

Back Issue Page