I loved May McDonough's 'Riverside' upon watching fajigajiga's animated short 'The Anglerpod'. Inspired by the short and this sultry melody, I had it in my head that if there was ever going to be a music vid for this number, it was gonna be 'noir-y', even though I haven't the faintest what that actually means.

Hence this record -> lust, love, betrayal, and death. Lots of black (it's noir, non?)

I realise for someone pretty green to this (my first fully-edited vid...with plot), I might have been too ambitious with the editing and plot. If it's all a convoluted mess to you (like I suspect it is), please shoot me a comment and I'll add the plot details in the record. That said, I would be so happy if someone used this vid as a springboard to better the storytelling or incorporate other themes.

PS: Did I mention how much I love 'Riverside'? :)

EDIT: I'm going to include the details of the 'plot' under the cut here, but I encourage you to watch the vid without reading it first to form your own interpretation. Once you're done you can compare it to mine and decide on how it can be better remixed (to yours or mine). Now no interpretation is wrong, mine is just one of them :)

Also, do share with me your interpretations! I'd love to hear them!

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Plot: 

2 guys walk into a bar. They are attracted to the sultry woman over there (songstress-?). They pursue her. She lets them. She strings both of them along. They eventually find out. One goes on a drunken rampage and eventually dies in a car crash. The other goes into depression and drowns himself. Yup.

It sounds silly when put like that, but the reason why there is an undercurrent of sensuality and danger is because I wanted her to be the femme fatale. The maneater. A dangerous woman who eats men for breakfast. And when I started exploring the idea of predator and prey; the idea that she was consciously manipulating these men...I thought it would be pretty neat if it were a movie and she was watching it with a smirk on her face. Works too if she was actually singing the song the whole time. Hence the last shot, the snippets of rolling film and dusty light streaks throughout the vid, the close-ups of the lips, and instruments/band clips.

I'm aware it's a pretty ambitious plot. It was a challenge coz the resources are all very different. But if you enjoyed it all the same, I'm a happy duck :)

wirrow first Released this song back in the springtime.  The first thing I did after the first time I heard it was email dan, saying "I found your new favorite song."  He and I share a love for the pleasantly repetitive.

Other musicians added to it, PixelPilgrim and ChenelyWelly added to wirrow's vocals from the female persuasion.  Nels Cline played hot guitar.  Jeff Peff added percussion and edited the whole thing together into its current form.

The hypno-face template is one of the cooler aesthetic feats our mass collaborative process has achieved so far: wirrow drawing the first face, then hundreds of hitRECorders coloring it into diversity.

And the work of a whole lot of video artists went into this montage I've cut.  Too many to name in this description, but I'll cite the resources below.  (I've listed some so far, but I'll have to dig around to find the rest)  The footage of dan spinning comes from Vanya, who is well intent on uploading the resource, I know because he's standing right next to me.

I apologize. Sincerely. See, this is what happens when I have a little (meaning way too much) free time on my hands...