MarchFourth made a command, and I made a music video
I also made DaVinci Resolve cry when I crushed 7594 still images through it.
On January 31st, 2022 just before midnight, I got a text from my friend John Averill, the MarchFourth band’s leader and one of its founding members.
“Are you busy this week? I’d love to get together and look at photos. I am insane but we want to release a single in a week and I’ve got a guy making a video but I just had this brainstorming idea tonight about using your photos in a simple way.”
The word ‘simple’ should have been my tip-off.
The following day, February 1, I sent John a really ugly concept video, taking 3233 still images from their 2019 Birthday show at the Crystal Ballroom and applying a ‘fuzzy’ transition and a huge speed ramp to create a weird trippy ‘video’ of the performance.
Me: “ain’t nothing but a sketch — no attempt to hit the beat, tweak the images, etc.”
John: “I like the general effect and see how it could be edited.”
Me: “I’m going to drop the ‘on white’ shots in and do a similar thing to see what that looks like.”
Right. I was just going to drop them in, super easy, no problem.
If you want to see DaVinci Resolve cry, feed it 4361 vertical high-quality jpegs in UHD resolution,
then push all of them into a timeline, cover them in morphing transitions, and ask it to play them back smoothly so you can start timing it to a beat. Oh, and do a bunch of transparency blend space voodoo so that the white backgrounds fade away to let the live show track bleed through. Even on my fairly beefy computer, using all the “optimize media” tricks I know, this technique made DaVinci very, very grumpy.
Anyway. It worked. A cool idea that showed a lot of promise—but—needed a LOT of work to take this rough cut and make it dance.
Feb 7th. The song got swapped out from a faster one with vocals to an all-instrumental track with a great, slow grinding build. Not exactly starting over, but not, not starting over.
Feb. 11th. I threw it all out and started again.
I rebuilt everything from the ground up. While it was starting to look like a “music video” it still needed a better visual through-line. In getting here I’d learned a bunch of tricks that were just easier to do if I started fresh.
While painful, it was the absolute right decision. Like doing a really ugly sketch that lets you make a bunch of dumb mistakes — all so when you start on a fresh canvas with paint, you are starting from a place so far ahead of where you were.
Feb. 14. More progress.
Feb. 15. A new studio cut of the song. More and more tweaks.
Feb. 16. Another new studio cut of the song. More tweaks. Can’t stop finding things to tweak.
Feb. 17. Every time I watch it, I find a new thing that can be smoothed out or something that can be tweaked to hit a musical mark better. I’m learning the depth of the rabbit hole that this could become and the perfectionist that I am and that self-knowledge of not letting ‘perfect be the enemy of good’ — so breathe breathe breathe and relax.
Feb 18th. Did a quick call with MarchFourth’s trombonist and songwriter Anthony to get his musician’s perspective on the work. We tweaked the pulsating “live show” images to morph closer to the beat of the song. It’s a subtle change on the visual side but definitely makes the flow better. Almost done. Again.
Feb 19th. More tweaks. Trying hard to let go and let it flow.
Feb 23rd. After a few days of giving it a rest, I opened it up again and 1) made more tweaks because that’s what I do and 2) realized that it’s really turned into something watchable and fun. The visual story found a rhythm and a flow that pushes this into something that I can watch it and see as the whole, not the parts. Cool.
Feb. 24th: Gold Master
I deliver the 22GB of Ultra HD ProRes immaculately rendered images. 7594 4k still images in total.
An email shows up from Nayana (MarchFourth’s marketing manager): “I love it! I think it's really great. The video made me hear the song in a new way, which is pretty cool. Thank you so much for all your love for M4 over the years. You sure do make us look good!”
A text from John pings me late at night: “I’m drunk and I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done for this band. When I wake up tomorrow I will not regret sending this haha!”
Happy 19th birthday, MarchFourth. Shall we begin work on the 20th birthday now? We’re gonna need a new shoot, I’m fresh out of images!
In case you missed it, some of the images used to create this video were awarded the highest accolade by Archive Magazine!
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