“Too Much”
Project Description
This video montage is about how ENFJ and INFJ personality types often love too much. They want a deep connection so bad it hurts. Love is painful. There’s a strong relationship between social rejection and physical pain. The pain indicates something is missing. Your body reacts as if a threat to a relationship is a threat to your life. If you love someone so much it hurts, there’s something psychological going on. It’s bigger than the particular relationship. It may be enmeshment or codependency. Psychosomatic illness results.
PAID COMPONENTS
Voiceover
The voiceover is a 250-word file titled “Loving Too Much.” The prototype video used a text-to-speech robot-voice production placeholder. This is then substituted later with a female British human voice. It’s 1 minute and 20 seconds 1MB MP3 provided by Chloe Wigmore (London) via Fiverr ($59.41 total with our tip included).
I slowed the robot voice placeholder down 10 percent on the master mix in Kdenlive. I can also do that using Speech Synthesis Markup Language code (SSML) in Polly. That lowers the original voice and makes it a bit longer. The voice synthesizer tool used is Amazon Polly. Text-to-speech conversion is available for mere pennies online. https://signin.aws.amazon.com/ I used an English British voice called Amy, Female. I split the voiceover into two sections to break the music monotony. The music lyrics go too long without a change.
OPEN-SOURCE COMPONENTS
Music Source
All soundtracks are music videos downloaded as MP3 audio files. I used free online YouTube downloader tools. There are many downloaders and they often advertise porn (so watch out!) Sometimes there is a copyright claim. But often when using stems, there is no restriction for monetization. But monetization is not our goal. I use YouTube only for hosting to conserve server resources. And keep our home site http://DizzyPictures.com loading fast. I use a WordPress video lazy-load plugin called Embed Plus Plugin for YouTube Pro ($39). Others are available but this premium one prevents recommendations of competitor video content. We want to keep people on our site and not on YouTube. YouTube has thwarted this feature to a degree with the inset “View on YouTube” non-feature link.
Audio Editing and Vocal Stems
I stripped the intro and outro vocal “stems” from two songs. One song called “I Miss You” by Daft Punk is for the outro (F sharp major 95 bpm). And a backing track of groove rock drum beats with matching 95 bpm for a transition at the end. The intro is a vocal stem from Elvis Presley’s hit “Suspicious Minds.” The first three lines of those lyrics are: “We’re caught in a trap, I can’t walk out, Because I love you too much, baby.” Each of these is 14 to 19 seconds in duration. Tiny samples.
Stems are stereo recording components extracted from many audio tracks. I created the vocal stems using https://ezstems.com/ free online tool. I cleaned up the downloaded MP3 stems afterward in Audacity. I used: the high pass filter, transformed the stereo into mono, and added audio compression.
Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor. It’s available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. We’re using open-source Linux Mint Cinnamon as our computer operating system.
Music Modules
Modular music is the combination and overlapping of different compositions. One over the other. The compositions are also called modules. For me, those modules are covers performed by one or many different artists in different moments. You can add or remove new modules to create new work, a new composition, different from the original one. You can expand and extend a modular composition in time, space and size.
Musical Counterpoint
Counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines (or voices). They are interdependent harmonies. Yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. Imitative counterpoint is the repetition of a main melodic idea. For example, on another video montage called, “Lonely,” I used a stem of Beatles Paul McCartney’s voice repeated in the soundtrack as an overlay. It may be across different vocal parts, with or without variation. Free counterpoint often incorporates non-traditional harmonies and chords, chromaticism, and dissonance.
It’s hard to write a beautiful song. It’s even harder to put together musical layers that sound more beautiful as a polyphonic whole. The internal structures creating each layer must contribute to the “emergent polyphony structure” – meaning unplanned goodness. Or musical serendipity. The way it’s accomplished is: counterpoint. Examples of imitative counterpoints include the round, the canon, and the fugue.
A canon is a counterpoint-based composition. It employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration. To get this effect, I use various covers of popular music. I often build a male and female round from two separate music videos. One voice is often a stem. The initial melody is the leader. The imitative melody in a different voice, is the follower. The follower imitates the leader. Either as an exact replication of its rhythms and intervals or some transformation. The key and beats per minute (bpm) of the covers are checked using an online tool at: https://tunebat.com/Analyzer
Most fugues open with a short main theme. A fugue is a style of composition, rather than a fixed structure. It sounds again in each voice. I’ve used this musical trick in recent times. It’s often followed by a connecting passage or episode. That develops from music heard before. I create more “entries” in related keys. Episodes and entries alternate until the “final entry” of the main theme. At this point, the music returns to the opening key or tonic. That follows with closing music, the coda.
A coda is often part of a post-credits scene (a stinger or credit cookie). A mid-credits scene is a short clip appearing after rolling all or some of the closing credits. You include a coda to reward the audience for watching through the credits sequence. It may be a scene written for humor or to set up a sequel.
In music, a coda (Italian for “tail”) is a passage that brings a video (or a movement) to an end – the conclusion. It may be as simple as a few measures, or as complex as an entire section. In my videos, I call the coda – the outro (more on that later). It’s usually played during the closing credits or end credits of the video.
Soundtrack
In my video “Too Much,” the main instrumental is a Delta-blues rendition of “Seven Nation Army.” The White Stripes band released it in 2003. It’s covered by Justin Johnson (1.33M YouTube subscribers) on a slide guitar in G minor at 114 beats per minute (bpm). The female singing lyrics over the top is a vocal stem of Sabrina Claudio (805K YouTube subscribers). She is doing an acoustic cover of her song “Tell Me” in B flat major at 103 bpm. Even though music components are all in different keys and tempos, they fit well enough.
I added “The Black Keys” by Ten Cent Pistol in G minor at 105 bpm. I used the song’s instrumental introduction as an intro layer and transition.
Seven Nation Army (The Glitch Mob Remix) is used as an instrumental outro.
Atmospheric Backing Track
I added a YouTube G-minor-chord ambient backing track – but not behind the voiceover. These are called “pads.” Ambient Pads are atmospheric tones designed to fill out the sound of any music. You layer them under any major or minor chord progression. Pads are ambient, sustained sounds characterized by heavy reverb and delay. They are a staple in audio productions from pop music to film scores. A pad is a sustained chord or tone generated by a synthesizer. It’s often used as background harmony or for atmosphere. Like a string section, it’s used to pad out the sound of an orchestra or film score – or in our case, perhaps a vocal stem.
Music heightens a video’s emotion. It creates an aural mood for each scene, along with sound effects and dialogue. Film scores are custom-made and often performed by orchestras. Today a video score might feature all manner of sounds and instruments. A video soundtrack is already-written popular songs featured in a film or video. In a two-hour movie, there is about an hour of music. My videos are often music videos. And so the music is 3 to 5 minutes long – on occasion, 7 minutes.
Open-source Video
Video clips are short videos, sometimes part of a longer recording. In “Too Much,” there are 18 to 20 open-source video clips – all different shots of a young couple in the London Underground. They are MP4s downloaded from Pexels.com.
I used 13 extra “Skull Candy” video clips from Pexels as fade-in-and-out overlays.
Video Editors
I do video production using Kdenlive open-source video editor version 21.04.3 on Linux. There is a newer version available 22.04.3 as of July 10, 2022.
Titles are made in Kdenlive except for the lyric rollover. It was created using Gimp image editor and also PhotoFilmStrip. PhotoFilmStrip creates video output of still images in 3 steps. First select your photos, customize the motion path, and render the video. The free-for-personal-use font is Big Noodle Titling, a display uppercase movie-poster font ($15 to buy the font family). https://www.dafont.com/bignoodletitling.font
Tracks
There are 10 tracks. 3 video tracks and 7 audio tracks.
V3: logo, title clips, lyric rollover
V2: Skull Candy video clips
V1: Young couple in London video clips
A1: 8.62dB, logo sound, voiceover, 20-second chant
A2: 5.81dB, female vocal stem
A3: -4.07dB, main instrumental slide guitar
A4: 0.00dB, outro 7 Nation Army rock instrumental with audio volume keyframable (aka ducking*).
A5: -13.67dB, G minor backing track (pad), not used during voiceover.
A6: 9.09dB, The Black Keys 52-seconds (intro)
A7: 0.00dB, 14-second Elvis vocal stem (intro), 49-second rock drum backing track (outro)
*Ducking temporarily lowers, or “ducks,” the volume level of a specified audio signal anytime a second specified audio signal is present. Ducking is commonly used to lower background music anytime a person speaks, then raises it when that person finishes speaking, as during voiceover. On this track, we set manually a drop from 0.00dB to 15dB during voiceover. Audacity can do auto-ducking.
I didn’t use a microphone or camera to make this video montage. All components except for Chloe’s voiceover, are free web assets. The final video is a 161MB MP4 file.
