What you are about to see here is a week-old, mind-blowing example of data mining and passion. A talented young man by the name of Ophir Kutiel, a.k.a Kutiman, poured through the countably many videos on YouTube of people playing music, practicing instruments, jamming, or showing off their mad skills and love of music and created beautifully lyrical mash-ups that musically surpass most of these performances by a few miles.  

John Peters, in his book, Speaking into Air, claims that “in the age of electronic media, [communication] has become the art of reaching across the intervening spirits to touch another’s body (p.225),” and I could not agree with him more.  

As the talented Erin McKeown sings: “there is hope in poetry, comfort in fiction.” There is, indeed, pleasure in the physicality involved in creating something heartfelt, even as simple as a webcam video of you attempting to sing, and then sharing that with others. That pleasure is only surpassed at the moment it generates a physical response in another, the moment were the bodies in the medium are moved to action. The soaring popularity of Kutiman’s videos clearly attest to that. Kutiman was moved to create an amazing project in six movements joining lots of people in their private act of music creation and connecting their efforts.  

We all want to feel a sense of connectedness and belonging. Even when we are singing loud in the shower, we are hoping someone is listening. What Kutiman created here is an extraordinary moment of someone from the apartment next door joining in your shower-singing in a duet across the walls the separates you. 

While there is comfort in ambient presence, the real potential for social media is when the electronic connectedness finds a way to generate a visceral response. 

The crowd was not wise on its own, it needed a human filter to cut through the noise, see a potential, and realize it.  I encourage you to check out the full project with links to the source videos at Thru-You.com.

crossposted at armyoffools.net

Today we talk about foley. Your film creation cannot live on music alone, unless you are making a silent movie, or you make sure you record every footstep sound carefully, you will need some sounds effects to enhance the action on the screen.  Most professional editing suites come packaged with all sorts bits and bites that you can use. If you do not have those, there is hope on the internet for non-commercial use: basically for free for students and filmmakers for online distribution and film festivals, with possibility of licensing for commercial when (more realistically, if) needed.

The resource I want to share with you today is The Freesound Project. Freesound makes available an ever-growing database of sound effect licensed under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license. This means you can use and abuse the samples for non-commercial purposes including remixing, file sharing and webcasting.

You may search the site using freeform text, tags, descriptions, usernames, or geotags.  There is also a “sounds-like” type of browsing available on the site. An account is required, but sign-up is free.

This was going to be the exception to creative commons music and a post about licensing from small recording houses. But in the past two days while talking to musician and studio manager Robby Baier at SoulTube, Robby just went ahead and posted a Non-Commercial, Attribution, Limited Use notice to the site. I verified this with the studio, and indeed, licenses to students are free (yay)-festival licenses included. When the money comes (keep believing), they would want to talk to you some more about commercial distribution and offer to even help you pick the right song for a scene. Either way, always give credit where its due.

SoulTube is home to a small, but a unqiue and beautifully-produced collection of artists. They have licensed music to commercials, TV, and films before so they are not new to the game. Check out their site, go to the “Songs For Film” section and choose the advanced search feature. You can explore from their list of artists, pick a mood, or search for specific words in the lyrics database (kudos!).

If this does not sound too good already, most of the tracks are also available in instrumental versions and you can hear the music and download it from the site directly.  Again, the only drawback is that it is a small collection, but the experience of dealing with people passionate about their music is vastly superior to any of the stock music houses or large labels.

You have labored over your film concept (the one you just came up with an hour before you had to pitch it), you have poured every emotion in your soul into the storyboards (mostly fear), and now you scurry about in the last two weeks of Winter quarter, squeezing whatever creative juices (and hard-earned cash) left in you to put out a story you can call your own into this cyberworld.

Visually, things seem to be falling into place (historically known as the crapper), and now it is time to find that perfect minor chord to send your audience weeping after they view your piece.

The musicscapes are vast and this post (in three parts) will only attempt to provide some guidance for those creating audio-visual projects to navigating the creative commons music territories (or swamps).

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Image by Brad Fitzpatrick

As a digital media nerd, I have no problem managing a billion different accounts on the Internet.  From social networking sites to bank accounts, I’ve accumulated about 30-40 different logins from the past 5 years.  I’m definitely not a pack rat by any means, but I’m starting to feel like I have too much junk in my (digital) trunk. 

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