The Black Shakes
April 25, 2017 4:59 PM   Subscribe

The Black Shakes
I made a video... thing, with loops and vocal improvisation and stuff. It's kind of funny.

My friends have a biweekly podcast where they assign themselves a themed challenge to make... something... and invite a guest and the podcast audience to join in. This time the theme was standup comedy. I'd been wanting to make an homage to one of my favorite pieces of video art, Catherine Ross's Trilling, so I used this as an excuse to do it.

I know nothing about standup comedy, so I asked friends on facebook to recommend videos of comedians who do a lot of broad hand gestures. I chose a video by Lewis Black, and went through it looking for particularly interesting gestures. I cut out those bits and laboriously made them into back-and-forth loops using iMovie, which is not the right tool for the job. (Trim the clip, copy and paste, reverse the second copy, copy and paste them both a few times, preview, and then start over when it doesn't look right.)

Once I had a big pile of about 35 loops, I watched them all over and over again, imagining what kind of sounds might go with the gestures. I recorded vocals over each loop, throwing away some that I didn't like, and then reassembled them in mostly random order into the final video.

Besides literally using a standup comic as raw material, I also thought of this as responding to the theme by doing something almost as scary to me as actual standup comedy would be: recording my "singing" voice!
Role: editor, vocals, editor again
posted by moonmilk (1 comment total)

I enjoyed that, thank you!
posted by InkaLomax at 10:37 AM on May 2, 2017


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