ALBUM ONE

Created in mid-late 2018

Experimental Music Video Project

TL;DR: I ambitiously challenged myself to create a music video album using primarily mobile devices, like the iPhone + iPad. Here’s the results, reach out to me and let me know how I did on social media.

Click here to listen to the album without music videos.

Challenge One

One of the interesting aspects of all of the music videos in this project is that the video resolution is 4K (3,840x2,160) and is mostly shot on an iPhone or a pocket mirrorless camera. This was a fun challenge to work with because of the hardware constraints of the devices (e.g. sensor size). To offset the quality, each frame in the videos below is downsampled within a frame to appear sharper, stabilized via a software gyroscope (on the iPhone footage), and color graded to bring out some depth.

ONE

The song in this track was designed to open with a large, airy stage and then constrain into a soft mid-tempo EDM beat, and then followed back into the airy stage sound as it fades out. Because of this, I lassoed the track to a slow-motion time-lapse to intensify the dichotomy of speed, this makes the [song] track appear like it is faster than it is. Fascinatingly enough, the arch of the bridge in the center of the frame reflects the pattern on the song with the reticent chanting near the beginning and end; like a mirror.

TWO

A big focus within both the video and the song is fluidity. In the video, I decided to represent this concept through water in different forms. The primary location of the cinematography in this music video comes from the island within the Great Salt Lake, Antelope Island, along with various other bodies of water within the state. Consequently in the song, I merged two very different sounds with its representation being the smoothed, yet accentuated transitions.

THREE

This song in this music video is a satirical interpretation of modern (c. 2017) EDM music with time-lapses from LAX, Santa Monica pier, and the Anaheim Convention Center in California within the Greater Los Angeles area.

FOUR

The song in this music video was my interpretation of early 00's JRPG club music. Consequently, the result of this was a mildly disillusioned, yet nostalgic pulsing rhythm accented by a wistful treble chorus. Because of the pseudo-melancholic tone, I decided to evince this through the video by displaying an environment in eternal dusk, with darkness on the horizon.

FIVE

I wanted to abstract the feeling of nostalgia in the song for this music video. To do this, I applied several visual and audio filters to the piece to create a medium that separates the source material (audio/video) and what the end-user, the listener, interprets. For example, the main riff within the song is supposed to reflect and emulate an archaic arcade game start screen song; whereas, the visuals display the cacophonous dichotomy between nature and manmade artifacts, like post-modern/polymorphic architecture (e.g The Broad in Los Angeles, CA). The middle and end of the music video emphasize this effect by linking the untouched Rocky Mountain Range peaks with the [highly] digitally processed chorus. The result of these actions is a haunting, yet sentimental music video.

If you want to listen to the album without music videos, click here.

Thanks for checking this out!

Check out more of my creations at jerelstarks.com and if you want, reach out to me here or on LinkedIn!

©2018 Copyright by Jerel Starks