first, some backstory. when i got my first video camera (let's say '99), my fellow bad taste artist murkbox was one of my roommates. he eagerly agreed to make a music video for one of his tracks, suggesting his then-new remix of his track "telemetry" from his excellent atmosphere ep. (bad taste trivia: murkbox later sold me the gear he used to produce atmosphere, an mc-303 and an sp-202, which i eventually used to produce _the fezzuck_. i still have the mc-303, though i haven't used it in a long time. i sold the sp-202 to unszene, who still uses it for live performances. that sampler has history.)
murkbox further suggested he was interested in experimenting with video feedback. i was game, so we gathered in my bedroom and filmed a bunch of video feedback using my 13" television. we also filmed a spoken introduction to the video, which neither of us ever liked (though we did have a happy editing accident, where the video unexpectedly and momentarily cuts to footage of a car being crushed).
murkbox and i agreed that i should edit out the introduction before posting the video on youtube, so i loaded the mpeg into pinnacle studio 8 (which came with my video card), edited out the offending footage, and recompiled.
i was supposed to get something like this:
instead, i got this:
wow, that's what an f'ed-up MPEG looks like, all right. databending fans, this video is a must-see. even more than the "who are these people?" video i posted earlier this month, this video looks like my databending gallery come to life, full of shifting bands of colors and dancing pixels. i couldn't have assembled a more perfect databending video if i had tried, so it only seems right that such a thing would occur spontaneously on its own.
(of course, i knew that it was possible studio 8 could glitch out the video—i had vaguely similar results last month when i tried to re-encode the original audio version of the drbmd "suffer" video—but i never could have guessed that the glitchy version would be so beautiful. but that's the nature of bending: you never know whether you'll get something fantastic, mediocre, or broken.)
in the end, i re-edited the video using windows movie maker (no kidding), which gave me a suitably un-glitched WMP file. normally i would eschew the WMP format, but for uploading to youtube it seemed okay.¶
Labels: databending
