Behind the Video Art Project

Inspiration

I've always been fascinated by the countless amount of videos I've viewed over the years on YouTube of people creating entirely new songs out of nothing, or the more common use of older songs and midis in association with different available source material to mix and match. Below are some of the videos in particular that I have always found great and helped me to figure out the direction that I wanted to take my video art project.

The Video Art Itself

One of the main things that seems to be in every one of the videos that I had seen above seemed to have its own beat in the background at one point or another that was not from the original source (however, I may be wrong with Big Beat Mario). Based on this, I decided to go my own route, using only clips from the original source and songs that were actually part of the show's soundtrack. I also chose to use these simply as jumping-off points for what I could do myself rather than having to focus my work around already established songs. The source that I decided to use was the original Japanese version of the series Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, which I happened to have the most access to. Having watched the series a couple of times and owning it on DVD, I felt that it would allow me to leave my comfort zone of creating this piece while still allowing me to be familiar enough with the source material to find good parts that I could splice together.

To begin, I decided to use this song for the credits, as it happens to be the song that plays during the credits of every episode. I have a soft spot for playing songs backwards. It's a weird fascination I've had for a while where I used to run songs through Audacity and reverse them just to see how they sounded. This was one of those songs that just seemed so much better that way, so I decided to add the "end" of the song (the beginning in reverse) because I really enjoyed the way it sounded.

A main staple song of the series, I decided to use a portion of this in reverse as the base of much of the second half of the song in order to have something in the background of the clips I was putting together. Without a steady beat, the clips by themselves just occasionally felt off-putting and did not seem to stand up as strong by themselves. Parts of this song were also evident in the clip near the beginning I had, however the audio in question at that point was actually part of the clip.