Category Archives: Music Video

MoNSooN

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Video: DoAn Forest

Music: “MoNSooN.” – a song from the alnum MeMoRieS FRoM THe FuTuRe. by mÌиdT૦UcHbE▲Ts.

made in September 2012

About this video:
I found myself fascinated by this bucket standing alone on this rooftop across the alley under the window of my Seoul apartment. There was something deeply satisfying about seeing this full bucket overflowing. The circle of the rim seemed to be a portal. The surface of the water seemed to speak a truth of the universe.
A few days previously, I’d downloaded a recent album by a beat-maker extraordinaire named MiNdToUcH. Without looking at song titles, the track “MoNSooN.” caught my attention. I saw the three ‘o’s of monsoon and thought of the circular rim of the bucket. (This almost became a very typographic-focussed video.)
The song, with its three distinct sections, called out for a completely different treatment in each section. The first part feels meditative and balanced; the middle floats; and the end comes unhinged. Im the video, I wanted to keep a sense of continuity in space; I also wanted to not make myself be limited by own footage, or, in other words, to let the song guide me into territory my own video footage wouldn’t necessarily reach. So, I began with my own cinema, my own bucket (well, technically, my neighbor’s bucket), then I looked in through the window upon the cinema of another, and finally let the cinema be invaded.
I want to give credit to some of the inspirations. First, the MiNdToUcH track; this is definitely a video that would not exist in this shape or form if it weren’t for the track. The music suggested the scenes, rather than being pinned to scenes already set. For the second part, I wanted something sexy and rainy; and, fortunately, a Korean film I’d seen fifteen years previously at the 1997 Vancouver International Film Festival came to mind: Motel Cactus, photographed by Christopher Doyle. I love how this entire film stayed in the same motel room, giving the viewer the time to also get to know the space itself. For the final part, I sampled scenes from the video game Call of Duty Black Ops, using the Kowloon map. As a non-video gamer, what led me to this? Well, just a month before at the 2012 Seoul Exis Film Festival, I saw a film by video artist Ip Yuk Yiu called “Another Day of Depression in Kowloon.” In this film, he took ambient scenes from this same game, turning it into a thoughtful, meditative exploration of space; rather than scenes of war, it was just spacey, still-camera scenes of rain filling the cracked textures of the virtual Kowloon. Seeing this film, my eyes were opened to the idea that video games could be a rich source of cinema (and, yes, I am aware that YouTube is filled with Machinima clips, so I know I’m late to this idea). Here, I didn’t actually sample the Ip Yuk Yiu film, because I wanted something more stalkerish, frenetic, and suspenseful. By the way, I went crazy with the filters in Final Cut Pro X to reinvent the look of the game.
There’s one more thing I want to mention about the first part; when the video cuts away from the roof and the bucket and shows the floating texts, “The earth reflects heavens,” this is footage of a temporary art installation that was at Sun Yat-Sen Gardens in Vancouver in Fall 2011. I filmed it on a rainy day, but it wasn’t just the rainy connection I wanted to make; to me, the wisdom the words was the wisdom of the bucket. The artist’s website is here: http://www.yoonhyungmin.com/heaven-and-earth/

… also check out a video I made two years, documenting a MiNdToUcH recording session in January 2011: http://www.doanforest.com/2011/01/mindtouch-minor-intrusion-sesson/ (or here’s the YouTube Link)

Sun Through

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About the Video:

Credits:

Music by: Stu Reed

50% of the shots in this video are my own; the other 50% are from the Getty archive of stock footage (most notably, the shot of the dancer comes from the stock archive). For the sake of a contest, I was given access to that huge library. Needless to say, some stellar works were created, and this particular video got lost in the shuffle. I can live with that; I was just happy to get to browse and download from that archive.

Here’s the full description of the video that went with the contest entry:

“From the earliest days of cinema until now, the image of the sun shining through trees is a much featured shot. It could indicate travel from A to B, the soul trying to escape the woods, restless longings, or the brain cutting in and out. The sun-through shot is quintessentially cinematic, with its flickering tension of light and dark. Video artist DoAn Forest has acquired a rather large collection of sun-through shots, and access to Getty Images provided the chance to smoothly link all this footage together. Here, the sun’s bursts get locked into the soaring melody, a melody which finally gave these stray shots a purpose, provided by musician Stu Reed.”

Of additional note, in case it is not totally obvious, I was really trying to make the sun bursts time with the music – not an easy task, and I became increasingly less careful about this as the editing went on. But, here I’ll embed the first test sequence of this idea:

MiNdToUcH – Minor Intrusion Sesson

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It was good news back in the fall, when I heard that MiNdToUcH had released his first album, ToNight aT NoON (you can download it for free at Bandcamp I’ve been keeping an ear out for his music during the past few years, tracking his admirably steady flow of new tracks, in years past on Myspace, and more recently on Soundcloud. I first met him in my Seoul apartment back in 2006 when he came by my place to have a look at some gear I was selling. No transaction took place, but our conversation started.

I appreciate how he’s built and evolved his recording set-up. In a day and age when people (myself being one of them) get carried away with desire for the latest recording gear and functions, MiNdToUcH has so far taken quite a stripped down approach. Much of his music gets made on samplers, like the Akai MPC 3000, which would have cost a fortune in their early 90s heyday and are now affordable collector’s items to be found on eBay and used shops. But, far from being dated by the 90s gear, I find something very sustainable in MiNdToUcH’s approach to making music – it’s refreshing to see somebody recording machine-based music without being dependent on evolutions of Mac or Windows operating systems and the resulting upgrade-itis. He seems to have this love for his hardware, which makes him want to try different stuff out, but he doesn’t seem to stockpile stuff. All gear he has is used and part of his workflow, or else it’s quickly gone. There’s nothing flashy about his approach, no unnecessary gestures – watching him at his equipment you can’t help but admire the certainty of his hand movements, the lack of hesitation.

Seeing MiNdToUcH’s stacks of floppy discs, each disc containing one set of beats, makes me think of a poet and his or her stack of notebooks. Each disc holds 10s of seconds of sounds, not even a minute. He seems to begin with a process of disassembly – then, when all the suitable bits and pieces are treated and gathered, the assembly begins anew, but it is a different work that has been created. After getting everything ready in the sequencer and the right sound on the right pad, he records the output to an external device – he seems to be access most of the tracks from his album right on his Roland SP-4-4. Then, on another day, he can rearrange, refocus, and reconstitute the same fragments into another flow. What exists on these discs is not finished songs, but a set of sounds ready to breathe again once inserted into the sampler, possibilities waiting to be conjured.

It would do an injustice to MiNdToUcH to dwell too long on his gear or his workflow. His music is above its process. He happens to be a photographer par excellence, and, bearing this in mind, I can’t help thinking of him as a photographer of music, circling around the sounds that he samples, shining a light on what was previously dark, overexposing something, playing with the contrasts – some techniques employed later in the dark room and others at the time of shooting. Clicking, adjusting, rotating, freezing, tapping, releasing …

MiNdToUcH’s music does what the name promises – the music becomes part of a thought process – ideas looping, new ones joining, something remembered then forgotten, an idea modified over time, a new notion. This could be a soundtrack to finding keys and then looking for doors.

Having met him in Seoul, having lived in Seoul myself, I can’t help associating his sound with Seoul. When I hear it, I feel the stop-start rhythms of the bus that carries me through central Seoul, the random announcements – I see the little slices of everyday life and occasional drama that catch my eye through the bus window … the minor intrigue of someone getting in or out of a taxi, a couple side by side both on the phone, a kid restlessly waiting … being out too late, needing to get up too early.

On the day, I filmed the brief scenes in this video, I arrived at his place late afternoon. As soon as I got there, he said we’d go out for a drink, as he’d already spent ample time in his home studio that day. But I pried a bit, asking him about this or that, and in the process of demoing something, he stumbled onto some sounds he liked, and a new session started. Finally, one more disc was added to the stack.

Visions Creeping

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This is a music video for the song “Visions Creeping” by the Kamloops band Sleeps With Matches (myspace.com/sleepswithmatches) … note that the video is unfinished, as it kind of peters out about a third of the way in. It’s the first thing I’ve ever tried to make using 3D software (well, 2D objects in a 3D space – using the software called Motion), and my idea certainly exceeded my abilities – but that’s part of the fun of the video, I think. A few of the animated elements, such as the rat, the lizard, the helicopter, and the radio, were downloaded from animationfactory.com, where I had a membership at the time. The plan for the rest of the video was to leave the house, then venture down a wasteland highway, passing by all sorts of weird characters and distant factories, then enter into a nuclear factory where there’s a spill, and finally to pass through a smokestack into the sky, and drift through stars, looking back at earth.
I’ve been working lately on two other videos for Sleeps With Matches. Check out Forgot Your Face and Inspiring Expiring.

Autumn Letter

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This film presents autumn scenes filmed around Seoul in November 2007, particularly on the walking trails of Namsan Mountain in central Seoul. A lot of the footage comes from the day I spent hanging around with my friend Matt – he was shooting photos, and I was doing video. It seems like I’m less shy about shooting people if I’m with someone. This video also represents my first film with the HD camera (Canon HV-120) that I bought from my friend Billy just a day or two previous. I love being productive with new technology right after I get it.
The music is an old Korean song by Kim Min-Gi called “Kaeul Pyunji” (“Autumn Letter”) (in Korean: 김민기 – 가을 편지).

Modestmouse – Missedtheboat

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Heard about a video contest for this upcoming Modest Mouse single. The contest page provided several different shots of the band in the studio, and against a green screen, recording this song. So, with that resource available, it was up to the video creator to take it from there. So, I projected the video clips into the bathroom sink and bathtub, and then using my underwater camera, filmed the scenes and then edited it back together. It got to be quite a tricky mess, in terms of trying to match up the video clips with the audio and what-not. Happy with the result, but never did hear any feedback from anyone on this video.

Woman of the Sea

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Footage of Jeju Island, its waterfalls, waves, and diving woman set to the music of Jet Echo’s “Nizium.” (myspace.com/jetecho)
Most of the footage was recorded in June 2001 on a rainy day with my old Digital-8 camera. I just didn’t have any idea what to do with the footage, until I somehow thought it would go nice with this song.