I know it’s past midnight and I don’t care, this post is for yesterday – I mean today! oh, crap, I mean August 21st. It’s one English post every day and I’m trying to stick with that. Yeah, I KNOW YESTERDAY’S WAS IN PORTUGUESE, damn! I don’t make the rules, ok? Actually, I do, but I’m still trying not to break them ALL at once. Let’s get to what matters, shall we?
I finally realized that even though this song has followed me the entire last year – through the good and the bad – I never mentioned it here yet. Well, it all started in the Modeling 1 classes, when François would put random indie tracks for us to listen while we tried to understand which poor life choices had caused us to move that specific vertex out of line and fuck up the entire asset – very likely the Chair. So, among these tracks there was a specific one with some whistling (yeah, indie tracks, I know, lots of them have whistling) but also catchy lyrics. It took me weeks to finally identify bits and pieces of words to find its name. “Little Talks” by Of Monsters and Men.
After that, I became increasingly addicted to it. I’ve had days (plural!) which this was the only music I’d listen to, on repeat. I’d bike to and from school listening and singing and whistling to this tune. I thought the lyrics were beautiful, but that was pretty much it. After some time, I started to create some empathy with what it said, for it somehow related to a couple things in my life. Winter came and so did other songs.
Many months ahead, last week, to be precise, Spotify throws an acoustic cover by Julia Sheer and Jon D. in one of my random playlists. What a fortunate reunion. First because their version sounds great, second, its minimalist approach got me. I started listening to it constantly, whistling and singing out aloud while biking on the seawall.
It’s been more than a few weeks since I started to feel an urge to play with After Effects. The hunt for good audio to make a kinetic type video was going on and last night I realized that this one could be a good call. I was too worried about making something outstanding and amazing when I should just worry about DOING ANYTHING AT ALL. For that I picked the last verses and chopped them in three blocks, each one under 15 seconds. Throwing that into After Effects with a square aspect ratio, I had decent instagram projects that could be finished in no longer than a couple of hours.
It was nice to remove some of the rust over the commands and effects, and remember how to do things working in layers instead of nodes. There are plenty of things I learned this year that I could port into my workflow. Since this was supposed to be simple, and match the song, I didn’t go crazy and kept it all minimalistic, black and white, without excessive movement or lens flares.
Tomorrow I’ll post the last piece. Then I’m restarting the hunt for interesting chunks of recorded voice in order to have a next project.
Yes, this song still says a lot to me, and I try to always be inspired by it in positive ways.