These are very early experiments I did in making short-form audio/visual content for the ftheradioblog and beeampersand Instagram accounts.
This is when the now-defunct platform Vine (owned by Twitter) was championing short, looped videos as the meme-o-sphere’s content du jour. Traditional content platforms (including the WordPress/Blogger hang-ons from the 2000s internet) were thought of as wordy snooze-fests, and I so I was looking for a new angle for my music blog.
Unfortunately, I never really jived with Instagram, and my interest moved towards audio-reactive/dynamically generated visuals, over this style of online content creation. The accounts were abandoned before they were even ‘launched’.
The aesthetic is a little rough around the edges by today’s standards; but keep in mind that this was from a time when the lo-fi beats-culture was yet to be totally dominated by imagery ripped from 80s & 90s anime.
Most of these were created rather haphazardly in Adobe Premiere.
Later I would use Adobe After Effects to add sound-reactive content; and specialised phone apps like Glitché or KaleidaCam for more impactful effects.
But I think the charm of these is how ‘unpolished’ they are. They totally lack a reason to exist, but here they are.
I started filming a-lot more often, with the intention of gathering as much of my own stock footage as I could.
Still, most of my content from this time was made with ‘found footage’; vintage 8mm film was my favourite thing to search for.
The same ‘sample-based’ sensibility that lo-fi beat-music is built upon marries itself well to this genre of found footage music video. El Famoso Demon and Coach Motel are some of my favourite examples in this space.
Ultimately, I lost interest in Instagram pretty quickly, and thus these pages were abandoned before I bothered to tell anybody of their existence.
Towards the end, I found myself searching more for colour and movement than for video content that brought a strong narrative component. These early experiments would later develop into the more abstract and kaleidoscopic content that I use for VJing.
Music credits: Bee Ampersand, dweeb, Guru Griff, infringement, InfiniteWays & Mellowmatix, oddigtl, subside, jsuus, quikk, Jealousguy