Hey
@pompeyjazz /
@PaulAds /
@SterixReally glad you opened this thread and I’ve already got a lot from the replies.
First up, I love that song John - it’s got a bucolic upbeat Kinksy feel to it. And I thought the video worked a treat - not contrived, but a nice visual accompaniment to the music. Where did you get the farming footage?
This is a really timely thread for me, because I’ve been spending nearly all my ‘music time’ recently trying to work on primitive videos in fact (which is largely why my ‘new song’ output has been non-existent here for at least half a year or so). I’ve been kind of conflicted by the whole video thing… It struck me that the video streaming platforms are really important to getting your stuff heard these days, like PaulAds says. On the other hand, I didn’t really want to be in the videos. So initially I set out trying to make a lyric video for some of my old tracks, using public domain photographs from the internet (mostly, Wikimedia Commons), editing them a bit using Gimp software, then stringing them into a video using iMovie. Here is one work in progress vid for a song that was on these boards a few years ago… I’d appreciate any feedback on it, as it is my first video attempt ever. As it’s all new to me I can’t really judge if it adds anything or is a pile of crap. The photos it uses are mostly convicts from North Shields from 100 years ago.
The thing is with public domain videos, they tend to be really old it seems. I’ve found a few useful sites - alongside Wikimedia Commons, I found sites like the Prelinger Archives which are full of weird old video footage:
https://archive.org/details/prelingerpexels.com also seems to have some video clips that are free to use if you credit the creators somehow.
And then there are sites like rotorvideos.com that seemed to offer free and paid for footage.
However, I've started getting frustrated with the time it was taking to trawl through various sites and download the public domain stuff… and a little bit of me feels that someone else could be using the exact same footage and somehow it didn’t feel ‘original’ enough. So now I’m coming round to the idea that it’ll just be quicker/simpler to either shoot stuff on my iPhone (and just get over myself and face up to being in the videos) or try and take or source original photos. In fact, this thread has given me an idea - I think I’m going to ask for the forum’s help on that for one track, in a separate thread.
It’d be great to discuss videos more here as it’s inevitably a pretty big part of the song process now I guess. There have been some great videos posted by the people on here... Mora's are always brilliant, as are Maya's, and I remember 'Christmas As It Used to Be' had a cracking video PaulAds.
