POEM-FILMS | Mini-DOCS

Pretend Yr Happy: A Collaboration with Dark Sparkler

This film is from a collaborative experimental video + sound project with Dark Sparkler, a Seattle-based Modular Synthesizer composer. The project is a series of (relatively) short films built on layers of video + sound with a Synth soundtrack.

The video + sound (the diegetic portions of the project) were crafted from culling a decade’s worth of video + audio material from iPhones, cameras, and hard drives from Joshua Young’s archives. The video and audio were loaded into Premiere, separated from each other, and pieced together, layered, and cut based on a set of rules, process boundaries, and intentional constraints. The sound layers were adjusted simply with volume levels, the video layers were adjusted through opacity and filters.

The compositions/soundtrack (the non-diegetic portions of the project were made using various tactics and approaches with Modular Analog Synthesizers: long form patches with a Lyra-8; process original sound in real time through tape delay and using machine effects to manipulate the sound into melody or drone, using a stereo effect to produce seasickness, sound studies, doppler effects; tempo and reverb manipulation, and more .

Around half of the films for this project + Dark Sparkler composed after the video + sound was delivered, while the other half was crafted to based on Dark Sparkler’s compositions.

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