Aleatory
aleatoric: characterized by chance or random elements (M-W, 2002)
I’ve made a “trailer” of sorts for the remainder of my vacation videos, in a style I’ve always wanted to play with. (I won’t embed the video here since it’s not really a part of the “Holland” series, but I’ll link to it on YouTube if anyone wants to see it.)
Aleatory is usually associated with music, and especially with the work of mid-20th century composer John Cage, whose Wikipedia biography has an extensive list of links worth exploring.
To create a “random” preview from the 4+ hours of unedited vacation footage I have lying around, I used a random number table to select twenty clips, each starting at a random time in some segment of the raw video and lasting for a random number of seconds (between 3 and 12). It’s like a paint-by-number in video form—even more tedious than normal editing. I’m pleased with the way it came out, though. The clips have no correlation to each other, but the randomness gives it an interesting flavor nonetheless.
Look at me, talking about a two-minute crap-ass homebrewed video as if it were a culinary masterpiece. I think my inordinate pride might be a subconscious attempt to justify the nine solid hours I’ve just spent* on it and its companion video, so don’t take my word for it**. It’s nice, if you like that sort of thing. If you don’t, well, at least it’s short.
Links: the random video, the video that explains the random video (four times as long)
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* It is now 6:00 in the morning. The timestamp disagrees because I’m waiting to publish this post until I’ve slept and am coherent.
** Name that ’80s children’s TV show!
Tags: miscellany