Contrast
It’s always fun to try something new and different.
All for Nothing is the fourth single from An Ape’s Progress — an epic five-minute rumination on Homo sapiens' struggle to survive and evolve here on Earth — so its music video needed something unique to set it apart. To convey the range of emotion in the lyrics, All for Nothing gradually builds from one solo acoustic guitar at the intro, to a full electric band plus orchestral strings by the coda. It’s a massive arrangement with big dynamics and a long running time, so I knew this video was going to be an artistic and technical challenge!
So I decided to try a stark, abstract video style this time around.
With this approach, I wanted to use contrast — the juxtaposition of light and dark — to emphasize the song’s heavy themes, and I wanted to visually convey tension and release in time with the lyrics. Inspired by hand-drawn graphic-novel artwork, I chose a stylized pen-and-ink effect in my video editing software, and set to work building a storyboard and abstract narrative. Using a combination of custom graphics and film footage, I put together a rough cut in a few days, and started applying all the pen-and-ink effects. It took many hours to fine-tune the high-contrast effects for continuity and “feel,” but it all came together over a couple of weeks. Things were looking pretty good, but something was missing.
With its five-minute running time and dramatic musical dynamics, I wanted All for Nothing to include at least one strong visual transition to keep things interesting. But with the sparse black-and-white hand-drawn style I had chosen, where could I go from there? The answer: color! I noticed that my video software’s effects suite also included color versions of my chosen pen-and-ink effect, so I picked one and tried cutting it in at the big break before the instrumental section. It worked like a charm! From the instrumental through the bridge, third chorus, and outro, I kept boosting the pen-and-ink color saturation, and it was looking great. With the transition from black-and-white to color at about the 3:30 mark, a five-minute music video was making sense and feeling “right” to me. It was going to work!
Nevertheless, I wanted to crank things up one more notch for this epic song, so I decided to try a video montage technique called “kinestasis.” Suggested to me by a close friend and creative advisor, kinestasis bombards the viewer with rapidly moving (and often disorienting) video transitions. This technique has been used in film and TV over the years, but I’d never seen it applied to a pen-and-ink style, so I gave it a shot. Kinestasis is labor-intensive due to the number of video edits involved, so I chose a short section mid-song to introduce the effect, and then used it exclusively in the final build-up to the coda, where the song ends abruptly. Of course, this will all make more sense once you see the finished product!
Check out the All for Nothing music video on my YouTube channel or this site’s video page.
It’s certainly something different — I hope you dig it!
-Pawlie.
