Surprise vid show at Symphony Hall
Jun. 8th, 2014 05:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bironicAs an early Father's Day gift, I got my dad and E. and myself tickets through work to attend Film Night at the Boston Pops with guest conductor John Williams. They drove up and we went on Friday. It was such a treat to hear live performances of, in particular, the Jurassic Park main theme, a Harry Potter medley, and the Star Wars opening credits music (first finale) and the Imperial March (first encore) by the man who wrote them and some of the musicians who recorded the original soundtracks.
A quarter of the way through, the strangest thing happened: The concert turned into Club Vivid.
A screen came down and they started showing clips from movies that related to the music being played. The first, a montage of D-Day scenes from WWII films, was as sentimental as the closing hymn being played from Saving Private Ryan, and it fell somewhere in between a slide show and a fanvid. Then they did one that was just scenes from various Olympic Games, which was actually more interesting than the music, because elite athletes are amazing.
But then -- then, in the second half of the program, they did a trio of video-music pairings that paid tribute to dance in film, and the first and third were honest to goodness fanvids that could have been shown at Vividcon to great cheer. My favorite was the first, a "multi-source vid" of tango scenes from decades of movies, ranging from Fred Astaire to The Addams Family, set to the tango music from Scent of a Woman. The third was all follies/fun dancing from musicals, like Chicago and Singin' in the Rain, although no Newsies. Both of those did their job right in not only being aligned to but also interacting with the music. (The second one was just uncut segments of the dream sequence in An American in Paris, set to music from... An American in Paris.)
Rousing applause for those. It was such a 'teachable moment'; I wished from my seat in the second balcony that there were some way to retroactively include a note in the program like "If you liked these, you'd love...." :D
Now I want the inverted version of karaoke vid show where we get live musical accompaniment! It was neat to see how Williams kept the timing right, with a digital screen in front of his music stand that displayed the vid plus a bar scrolling from left to right with every other measure.
*
I probably can't afford to go to Vividcon this year, but I am going to con.txt this coming weekend. Thanks, past self, for pre-registering! Looking forward to several of the meta panels (do I have to tumblr?; bi-invisibility; dubcon; supernatural creatures and the law; Small Fandom Dating Game and fannish Pictionary; vid show; support group for small fandom and between-fandom fans; etc.) and especially to seeing D.C.-area fan friends again, most of them for the first time since I moved back north 9 months ago.
A quarter of the way through, the strangest thing happened: The concert turned into Club Vivid.
A screen came down and they started showing clips from movies that related to the music being played. The first, a montage of D-Day scenes from WWII films, was as sentimental as the closing hymn being played from Saving Private Ryan, and it fell somewhere in between a slide show and a fanvid. Then they did one that was just scenes from various Olympic Games, which was actually more interesting than the music, because elite athletes are amazing.
But then -- then, in the second half of the program, they did a trio of video-music pairings that paid tribute to dance in film, and the first and third were honest to goodness fanvids that could have been shown at Vividcon to great cheer. My favorite was the first, a "multi-source vid" of tango scenes from decades of movies, ranging from Fred Astaire to The Addams Family, set to the tango music from Scent of a Woman. The third was all follies/fun dancing from musicals, like Chicago and Singin' in the Rain, although no Newsies. Both of those did their job right in not only being aligned to but also interacting with the music. (The second one was just uncut segments of the dream sequence in An American in Paris, set to music from... An American in Paris.)
Rousing applause for those. It was such a 'teachable moment'; I wished from my seat in the second balcony that there were some way to retroactively include a note in the program like "If you liked these, you'd love...." :D
Now I want the inverted version of karaoke vid show where we get live musical accompaniment! It was neat to see how Williams kept the timing right, with a digital screen in front of his music stand that displayed the vid plus a bar scrolling from left to right with every other measure.
*
I probably can't afford to go to Vividcon this year, but I am going to con.txt this coming weekend. Thanks, past self, for pre-registering! Looking forward to several of the meta panels (do I have to tumblr?; bi-invisibility; dubcon; supernatural creatures and the law; Small Fandom Dating Game and fannish Pictionary; vid show; support group for small fandom and between-fandom fans; etc.) and especially to seeing D.C.-area fan friends again, most of them for the first time since I moved back north 9 months ago.
no subject
Date: Jun. 8th, 2014 11:35 pm (UTC)I will be sad not to see you at VVC! ):
no subject
Date: Jun. 10th, 2014 05:10 pm (UTC)Reverse vid karaoke (or vid karaoke with live music as well as live vocals) would be a fun thing. I've been reading (and probably talking) a lot lately about early musical accompaniment to films, which sounded like reverse vidding -- the video was fixed, but the music was clipped up snatches of tunes the audience would recognized, paired to the video in order to support it or argue with it or make fun of it, while still trying to keep the music flowing. Doing this live seems like quite a challenge, but I saw an impressive performance at the theater in Davis back in January that demonstrated it was possible to do wonderfully. I wonder if live VJ-ing could be a similarly fun experience. If you know what the orchestra is going to play and how it's going to play it, vidding ahead of time gives you the most time for artistry, but having room for improvisation could be exciting as well.
Eep, I forgot Mothers' and Fathers' Day this year. /o\