The songs was released 26 April 2011 and was a collaboration between Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman, and Damian Kulash. On the 26th there was 2 tweets from Amanda Palmer amandapalmer Amanda Palmer many suggested SUPERFAST videos should made for the #8in8 songs. the songs are under a @creativecommons license, so you can. GO!!! MAKE!!! amandapalmer Amanda Palmer …and i personally challenge you to finish your video by the end of the weekend. best & fastest wins. go! go! go! http://bit.ly/get8in8 I didn’t get a change to listen to any of the songs until later on the night of the 28th. I sat down in front of the computer and started to listen to the songs one by one. I knew I wanted to do something but not what. It wasn’t until I reached The problem with saints – then I knew what I wanted to to. This being quite late at night i plugged in my head phones grabbed my notebook and started to write down all the images I was getting in my head. 1 hour later and countless plays of the song I had my script (if you can call it that!) I invited some friends to the shoot the next day during the royal wedding. Needless to say not a lot of people responded but 2 of my good friends Gary Noble and Magnus Arrevad did. And I am so glad they did! Without those 2 the video would not have been what it turned out to be. And thank you for the Royals for giving these peasants the day off to shoot this video! The piano in the song reminded me of the old silent film with an accompanying piano I had seen when i was a kid I wanted it to look like it could have been from around the turn of the century and a comedy. A quick look on the mighty Internet and i had a somewhat clear image of how I wanted Joan of Arc to look like. 40£ in the local fancy dress show in Soho and I had a plastic sword, a short blond wig and some makeup. White for the face and black for the lips to make them stand out once the colour footage had been converted to black & white. We met up the next day at 12 noon and starting shooting. It took us 3 hours, a lot of strange looks from the other people in the park, 2 currious girls and a lot of laughter and the best quote of the day had to be Lets shoot that again! Just because it was fun! 3 hours later, a wet gary and a thirsty Magnus we wrapped the shoot in the pub! The great thing about it was that even though I had everything written down and thought through the creative collaboration the 3 of us had on the day – made the video a lot better that If had done it all on my own. Its amazing to see one of the guys doing something unexpected or suggesting a specific change only to get that special feeling of “YES! that’s it! its so much better now!” Creative collaboration is such a strong tool! and should never be underestimated! The original footage was converted in MPEG stream clip (a free media converter) to Apple Pro rez 25pfs so I could work with it in Final cut pro. The “old” look is a mixture of normal colour correction and some quite cool effects from Magic bullet looks. iIt took around 4 hours to edit it all and render it out from 1080p to 720p for use on Vimeo and Youtube. It wasn’t until Sunday evening that I spotted this tweet from Neil Gaiman himself. That’s a wrap! To read more about the project please visit http://music.amandapalmer.net/album/nighty-night To watch the video please go here Ps. Im sorry about any spelling mistakes but I cant spell to save my life!
I first heard about the 8in8 project from a tweet from Neil Gaiman on the 26th talking about setting up the studio. I got quite intrigued by what was going on. I quickly learned about the 8in8 project as it came to be called. The idea was simple to create a series of songs for the charity berkleecitymusicnetwork.org – a charity which provides kids with every opportunity to see their musical potential.
So now its out there and there has been nothing but kind words and praises for our video! I thank you all for that! It was such amazing fun time making the video and I think it shows.
