Nicola D'Agostino (.net) - Articoli, traduzioni, grafica, web

So, how bad was the fire?

Take some horrifying but hypnotic NASA footage with a crash test of a plane full of dummies, the availability of digital video editing and scoring tools, an ambitious and ironic graphic design agency and what you get is the Crash Ballet contest.

by Nicola D’Agostino

This is Coudal and Partners, after all, the guys who invented and made popular “Photoshop Tennis”, a postmodern game played between graphic manipulation jocks who take rounds at visual fighting by layering images and ideas one on another.

Keith Watson entryWith the Crash Ballet contest they just upped the stakes and took manipulation to the next level, that of audio/video remix productions.

Here’s some video: add some music and make your own cut. What’s notable is not only that the underlying idea is good, but that the contest entries are also nice, little gems, presenting a wide array of styles and approach, and some neat movie editing and scoring techniques.

One of the most noteworthy is the winner, Ethan Mitchell, whose audio track has been cleverly put to use pairing the soundtrack’s lurching and staccato (a remix of Interpol’s Untitled) to a slow motion effect of the original video material in a painful dissection of what happened that ends with the apt sample “So, how bad was the fire?”.

Also very good, if not even better in its concise and direct approach, is the raw and crude result of runner-up Keith Watson who adopts a very short hardcore (the metal kind, not the techno/dance one) track, SOD’s “F**k the Middle East”, and emulates successfully the feel of some actual metal/trash videos of the past (Anthrax come to mind, who are closely related to SOD, by the way) substituting car hits, crashes and explosions with the damage sustained by the plane and the dummies in the inside. There’s nice stuff also among the further entries like Alex Taylor’s, a Seventies’ hard rock cum keyboards audio track which expresses nicely the fury of the featured video sequences.

Originally published in January 2005 on LiveJournal