We’ve seen some pretty impressive innovations in the music video realm in recent years; from Dutch bands ‘crowdsourcing’ mouse cursors, controlling how drunk a British rock group gets while playing, or the 73-year-old, Australia-bound Bob Dylan showing the young ‘uns how to really pull off an interactive clip, with his awesome ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ video.
But what about a music video that’s completely different every time you watch it?
That’s the concept behind ‘Pandora’s Box’, the new online video project commissioned by French indie band Isaac Delusion, which reverses the typical idea of using music to score or punctuate the visuals and instead uses video footage to underline the band’s airy slice of indie rock – but never in the same way twice.
How does it work? As The Creators Project details, while users listen to ‘Pandora’s Box’ (which you can experience here), the video is randomly sourcing from a “database of 600 short video sequences” taken from the Prelinger Archives, a public domain archive of stock footage that was created in 1983.
The library of snippets runs the gamut from old cooking shows, documentaries, surreal experimental footage, TV dramas, advertisements, and even Hitchock’s classic thriller, North By Northwest. Though all seemingly disconnected from the music, each short clip is associated with a specific point in the song.
Using a pre-determined algorithm, the public domain clips then match the rhythmic and musical elements of Isaac Delusion’s track. For example, one test run found vintage footage of a rifleman stocking his gun accompanying the drum’s four-four beat while a slithering snake matched the hi-hat, then a parachuting man in free-fall during the steadily rising chorus.
Creators Alizée Ayrault and Claire Dubosc, of Studio Clée, explain that the visual matches were ‘chopped up’ according to different sounds in the French band’s song, constructed from electro-pop samples and tessellated rhythms.
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“We envisioned our video editing to fit a similar construction,” Dubosc explains, “finding a balance between mechanical occurrences that would illustrate the music, yet have more freedom with the images associated to the lyrics, and give room to a more poetic, literary take on the track.”
Ayrault adding that “each video-sample in the sequence has been cut and associated to a specific folder that we [assigned].” When viewers open ‘Pandora’s Box’, the video is randomly drawing from those categorised folders of sounds and images; with over 600 clips and 1,500 possible shots to source from, there’s a seemingly infinite number of combinations available, meaning no two viewers will get the exact same customised video.
It might not be as smoothly choreographed as a traditional music video, but the one-of-a-kind video concept can lead to some rather amazing synch-ups.
Generate your very unique video at http://www.infinitepandorasbox.com/, and if you really dig it – you can always share it on social media before creating a new one.
