MUSIC VIDEOS

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This category is for either music videos I have made or participated in. That could be Me playing live shot from the crowd, or me playing in my studio, or pop videos I have been in, made or whatever… I am NOT including films made by me with my music on. They are all in the Film menu.

Depth Map Video Processor – Setup Guide (Mac)

Introduction.


When making videos for Cranes recent re-releases, Im always working solely with old material. For Dada 331 I used footage from the Paradiso, and for “Wires” and “Here comes the snow”, both the videos used footage from a show in teh earlier 2000´s which I didn’t play at. I didn’t originally start with the footage of snow and landscape near my home in Norway.
As the song comes from the album “Particles and Waves” I first tried to build a video out of the DATA from that concert footage, and the audio waveforms of the song.
The technique I wanted to use was using a program called Touch Designer which I have been wanting to try for a while. Normally used in VJ effects or artist gallery installations, its particularly good at taking data and transforming it in realtime into visuals.
So I tried, using the video and audio for “Light Song.
So its two main elements. Visuals created from a particle system powered from teh audio that has been split into 3 frequency bands, a bit like an old Sound to Light system in school discos from the 70s, and 3d video generated from the gig footage.
Here what I wanted to do was, by using the same particle system, but this time moving teh particles based on depth in the video. If a particle was on Alisons arm, it would be infront of a partical that was on her face. So first I had to get depth information from teh video. iPhones generate it, (If they have the Lidar lens) and 3d modelling can generate a depth map, but not old video footage So I used an AI too from artificial labs to “guess” a depth map. This worked, but only on a frame by frame basis, so I had to create a way to

1. chop up the video into single frames
2. upload one image to artificial labs to do the depth map
3. download it when finished and upload the next

As the site only did one frame at a time I programmed using Claude a system to do this automatically.

When I finished, it hadn´t quite worked. It was a cool experiment, but we decided not to upload it to the Cranes channel.
But it WAS a fun experiment, so rather than bury it on a hard-drive heres first, I decided to put it here:
This is VERY NERDY. But the full and geeky explanation video complete with instructions and code follows on the second page of this post.

First, lets see the finished video. exclusive here and on YouTube.


CLICK HERE TO SEE THE NERDY “MAKING OF” VIDEO

Wires video

Heres my video for Wires a song from the Cranes self titles album.

Bast in Colour

The Bast “Give me strength” video is now released in colour!

Telling Lies – The Fashion Focus “Promo film”

I have just about come to the end of making a promo film for the song “Telling Lies” for the US band The Fashion Focus.
The film is all stop motion, made from printed out paper models.


It took about 8 times longer than the budget, but was worth it to have a real paying project to work on using “The Machine”.
The nice thing to discover was how great it was to work on the machine for such an extended period. Only once did something not work and it turned out one drive belt had come loose. It will be interesting to find out if this is a typical issue, maybe I need to tighten all the belt before a shoot starts. Although Brian from the band my have his on meaning behind the song in his lyrics. I interpreted what I heard, and he was happy with the concept that he be seen as some kind of sinister, “Big Brother” type leader on the TV screens in living rooms. Of course I am referencing that everyone is sucked in by all the information coming from one source, that they have themselves invited into their own homes, The mobile phone. But we go back a few years and use the TV, the big precursor to the internet. On every screen, in many family rooms the same message is delivered, until, we peek outside and find the same screens have now multiplied to be on every building. A secondary theme is the quick cuts of the little paper truck who appears to be rushing through the empty street, the single lonely voice, who takes us to the nightmarish conclusion into a dream world, where hundreds of people are standing blankly staring at white walls. The bland and brainwashed. As part of the concept, the shots of the people were all created by using that lazy new technology of AI, itself another type of lies, that the world needs to be aware of from now on. Its incredible to think that.. thats it now, no going back, no-one can believe a thing they see or read. Maybe its a good thing, maybe the skepticism AI has created, had ended the rule of the big TV and media companies who purported to be telling the truth. Now we know they are not.
I think its a shame though.

Dada 331 video


After 4 weeks we added a little push to the sales of the Peel Session by “releasing” Dada 331. I had been working on the video for a while. It had not been a very easy process. First, Nick had found the master tapes from the Paradiso show in his loft and took them to Manchester where he had a friend who had taken his old Betacam machine off him, and proceeded to transfer all the stuff for me. He did everything, all the camera angles from that gig, some behind the scenes stuff, and he also had all the rushed to all the pop promos I made for Cranes. Inescapable, Adoration, I hope, and Tomorrow’s Tears. When back in Winchester he started to un the lot thru the Topas upscaling program and sending me bit and bobs. Meanwhile I had got the lyrics for Dada 331 from Alison and started animating them on “The Machine”.

And it went so well and was SO MUCH FUN! I was so please with this, I have been wondering that when I ever really got around to working on the machine (instead of building it, and tweaking it and fixing it) that maybe it was really boring, or did not work well. I have to say I haven’t had so much fun or been so content in myself as when I was working with this. I didnt even do it right the first time and had to worried of annoyance tin doing it again. See my idea was to cut out all the letter sand just animating them in and maybe out again in maybe ways. Of course this could have been done in After Effects, that that is just such a horrible program to work in, I’m always fighting it. Everything looks so so smooth and fake. You always have to pay attention to easing things or using wiggle plugin to make anything seem charming or not like Powerpoint. Anyway, first I printed all the letters out and animated them on my desk. That is white paper on black background. (See the video above) That was the mistake. When i looked at it over the footage of us playing it looked PUNK! Very cool, but not very Cranes! That damn Jamie Reid, no no-one can do it. Anyway some of that stuff stayed in, but most of it I redid, white on white but with the edges of the paper pieces sometimes showing. Looked great.
the rest of it was really just a jgsaw puzzle, some stuff downloaded from Archive.org… god I love that site… who needs Netflix?

The video was launched on the Cranes YouTube channel on April 5th.

Cranes – John Peel Sessions 1989-1990

So, on Thursday, we released John Peel Sessions 1989-1990, a limited edition mini-album from two sessions we recorded for BBC Radio’s John Peel. The first session in July 1989 and the second in March 1990 at BBC Maida Vale. The album has been mastered at Abbey Road.
Its been a bit of a secret, and although we haven’t made an official announcement, that the original band of me, Matt, Jim and Alison are working together again, but I guess the cat IS kinda out of the bag.
The last week has been pretty busy as I knocked together a quick video for the first track that was released on “Launch day”. (EG Shining) see below.
I dont really understand the way things are done now, but the album will be released on June 3rd 2023.

It is available for pre-order from here:

https://cranes.bandcamp.com/album/peel-sessions-1989-1990

it was pretty fun and quite “hands/on” at least for Alison and me, who worked all day preparing bios, texts for social media and graphics for the various shops in the UK (all part of a chain called Dinked) that would be releasing the “special edition” version on silver vinyl.

Finaly the moment came at 5oclock when our bandcamp shop would open for pre-sales, and the Dinked shops would add the record onto their pages and we madly started posting the announcements on Facebook, Instagram and Bandcamp, where we would actually be selling the record from. This is called ‘releasing a record’ nowadays. After a tiny moment where people were saying “link doesnt work”… “Cant get in” we realized that the Bandcamp had not been set to Public… we did that.. and immediately, my phone plinged, and flashed an vibrated. I had forgotten that every time I get a sale on bandcamp, I get a notification… normally it doesn’t happen very often! (See note below)
“Our first sale!” I posted on our private Cranes Whatsapp channel. And went out into the darkness and across the garden to close up the chicken house, still clutching my phone. SUDDENLY the garden was lit up by a crazy flashing strobe light, my phone plinging and vibrating constantly… I looked down and notifications were flying across the screen KER-CHING” (this is what bandcamp send you wen you sell) KER-CHING! KER-CHING! KER-CHING!KER-CHING!KER-CHING!KER-CHING!KER-CHING!KER-CHING!KER-CHING!KER-CHING!KER-CHING!KER-CHING!KER-CHING!
In one hour all the Silver copies we had for sale were sold out, (90) and by midnight all our black ones… Dont worry we have more stock now, we are going to print enough for everyone.

So that was fun. Lets do it again?

Note, yes its very sad, there I have being very busy making 12 albums over the last 20 odd years and cranes got more sales in the first 10 minutes than i have ever had. but.. I admit my stuff is mostly just weird buzzing noises, and as such not terribly commercial, Im ok with that, really… but it would of course be remiss of me to not post MY own personal bandcamp link, now wouldnt it, THAT woudnt be pushy would it?

https://markfrancombe.bandcamp.com/

Project 23

Heres the video for the track I made for the Loopers Delight Compilation.