Sketch 12 – Audience Selected Music

How is skate video transformed when the audience can select the music?

Link: https://vimeo.com/125697729

Throughout this experimental exercise I have become interested in notions of audience interactivity within online video practices, as an extension of online tools and services. Also, looking ahead toward the prototype assessment for project 4, I have thought about potential interaction with skate video that may not necessarily exist as such. As mentioned in previous sketches, the narrative and non-narrative form of skate video is strongly structured around the use of music. For example, timing a skater landing a trick with a prominent beat in the soundtrack is an important technique in skate video as it creates a non-narrative aesthetic ‘flow’, whilst structuring the narrative form (the sequence of events) around the structure of the music. Most importantly, it is symptomatic of skate video. Furthermore, the genre of music is selected closely in skate video in order to create the desired ‘feeling’ for the video. Whether it be a ‘sponsor me’ video to be taken seriously, or a video of friends casually playing around on skateboards, the music used is going to be very different. In a typical linear skate video, the selection of music is conducted by the producer solely. Which sparked my interest in an exploration of how the narrative/non-narrative form of skate video might be transformed through the audience selecting the music.

To create this sketch, I video recorded Errol performing the skateboarding line in its entirety and used image and video editing software to develop a song selection on the side of the footage. A combination of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop were used to create the song list on the right hand side of the frame and video editing techniques were applied to create the highlighted change in song selection. I then screen recorded a playback of this video and timed my hand movements in order to include the presence of a mouse icon, resembling the selection of an audience member. All of the music is royalty free and the track names are accurate.

Upon reflection of this concept, once the audience has control over the selection of music, a level of the creative rights, along with the ability to structure the narrative is transferred from the producer to the audience. Furthermore, the non-narrative aesthetic ‘feeling’ of a skate video, primarily created by the music, is portrayed to the audience potentially more powerfully and effectively due to the fact that the audience member can create the ‘feeling’ for the video that they desire.

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