Easter Colour Mix - the companion piece
Monday, April 25, 2011 at 9:39PM
Warren

Sometimes, things go pear-shaped, and sometimes, things happen in pairs.  (Ask Erik Satie about pear-shaped.  After all, he wrote "Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear.")  I had just finished "City Night Rain," the previous video on this site, when, on Easter morning, I was sitting at Cliffy's Cafe in Daylesford, Vic, watching people passing on the sidewalk.  I noticed that my cellphone could take pictures tinted red, green or blue, so I filmed 30 seconds of passing people on the sidewalk in each colour.  At home, I loaded the videos to my computer, and stretched both the videos and the soundtracks, and made a music track as well, then mixed them all together in such a way that the balance of red, green and blue was constantly changing.  Although my original idea was inspired by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill's "Three Colour Separation" film series, I realized that my mix was more about changing colour balances than about reassembling a sense of realistic colour. The result is a sort of daytime companion to the nightscape of City Night Rain.  The piece sort of "wrote itself."  That is, it just fell together, but I'm really happy with the results.  I think these two video works turn out to be sections of a larger work, yet to be conceived.  To me at least, they seem to suggest that.  For the moment though, I'm happy with them as a pair of mood pieces.  And for those of you into such things, the electric piano track is a jazz chord progression retuned into a just-intonation scale based on a Fibonacci-like additive series.  There are two tracks of electric piano, in the rhythmic ratio of 84:87, with the two tracks approximately a minor third (6:5) apart.  Again, like in City Night Rain, I think this will look best in a dark space in full screen with the sound pleasantly present, but not overly loud.

 

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