Anyone with half an eye on the political goings on in the US will know what this means. It emerged without intention from some experiments with sound and film construction and said its piece.

The main driver for it had been some issues with copyright relating to the use of a music track via Epidemic Sound that I am still hoping I can use with an AR overlay to a painting that will be in a forthcoming book. I had the composer’s permission to use it but needed to check with the hosting platform. Their questions seem to assume that I’m a large company likely to make profits from this piece when the reality is that the book is unlikely to be a big seller, and the number of people accessing that particular page, having the app necessary for viewing the AR and then actually doing so will be even lower.

So while I’m waiting for Epidemic Sound to make sense of all this and fit me into an acceptable category, I’m taking time to become more familiar with some apps I’ve had for a while but not properly investigated. YouTube has become a brilliant resource for this kind of thing and I’ve been down a rabbit hole of filmmaking and audio track construction that’s opened up the process for me immeasurably. The result is a collaged visual using just one painting that’s cut, resized, clipped, overlapped, and variously repositioned on the video track supported by an audio piece begun using instrumental clips from the Magix Music Maker (MMM) app, manipulated there by pitch, length, position, direction, and volume, and imported into Cyberlink’s PowerDirector to be further edited under the visuals.

Quite often, I lower the pitch and reduce the speed of audio tracks because I seem to be drawn to that slight darkness this creates, but this time I also paused, reduced the volume, halted, and then reintroduced the audio to add drama to the piece. The result is an intentional jigsaw and probably the first filmic composition that is wholly mine.

Some of the visual elements in the book do benefit from actual music and, as I’m not a musician, I’ll be waiting to hear ES’s verdict on my liability for costs in what’s probably something of a first for them. In the meantime, I’m discovering new production skills and reducing my dependence on off-the-shelf materials, which means I can use the results anywhere. And I’m not above circling some of my musician friends and acquaintances – paid for, of course!

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill