So my first reaction to the privilege of making a Tori Amos video was "Wow, okay I am going to direct a video portraying one of my all time favorite artists." Not only was the green screen footage of Tori copyright free, it was editable. The only problem I really came across was removing the tracking markers in the background. The first step I took in editing the video was create a multi-clip in Final Cut Pro. I created the multiclip and ran a few rough cuts of which shots of Tori I liked in certain time frames. I ran through quite a few of these cuts until I really grasped onto one. I had already had my ideas layed out.
The song is "Bouncing off Clouds," so needless to say I made sure that I began the video featuring Tori in this literal atmospheric depiction of the clouds. I wanted to start out with Tori's hands. There is a sensual moment every time that Tori's fingers stroke the keys, so I really wanted my audience to "feel" this light, cloudy sense of free spirit. To me, the song's meaning is among various dimensions. In this sense, any perceived meaning is the correct one. Hence, there really are no "wrong" answers here. Furthermore, I took Tori and her brilliant piece into the perceived mountains (or in this case, clouds) of the unconscious.
The visuals birth senses of dreamlike states as the sky changes from day to night, from mint to red, from city to the people caught up in its routine. These images set forth a very powerful viewing experience. At one point, I felt as if I were playing off of Madonna's "Ray of Light" video which also depicts fast-paced city streets and features Madonna in clouds. As I stated before, I start Tori in the clouds-the lightness in our lives. From the clouds Tori's image is then shifted into the busy streets of New York City. The busyness of the people and fast-paced motion can represent a variety of ideas. It serves as a vision of the fast-paced caught up state we find ourselves in when living in a capitalistic society.
The traffic and busyness can also represent a difficult time in one's life. For example, a break up with one's true love, a family death, a bad day at work, a recurrent failure. So, in a sense we are all sort of "bouncing" off of these daily or lifetime dimensions of stress. As Tori's apparition changes from city to sky, one finds a sense that even in all of this, one must learn to escape back to an ultimate dimension of happiness.
"Make it easy, make this easy," Tori sings as the background shifts from technological busyness to a more natural state. Flowers are trapped behind her image, representing an obstruction from an intimate connection with a natural world once known. As Tori is taken through these obstructed views of the simpler world, patches of flowers and green sky show through depicting "wrapped in metal wrapped in ivy. Paint it in mint ice cream." Right when she sings ivy, the flowers are portrayed as an obstruction. A "collage" of Tori's imagery is used to depict this obstruction which portrays her hands stroking piano keys while she sits right in front herself. Her fingers play along the piano with another layer featuring her straddled between two keyboards.
When Tori sings "mint ice cream," the green sky image depicts the world sought to escape to. Also, the term "mint" is a form of green, so it worked quite well. Continuing through, Tori is then floated through these montages of the busy city streets, back to clouds as they shift from day to night. As this occurs, Tori sings "well you can stare all day at the sky." As she leans back towards the moon, the background then shifts to visuals of Times Square, a busy place, indeed. At this point in the video, the viewer may find themselves pleading, or perhaps longing for a change to this busy world she is trapped inside. At the bridge, "make it easy, easy, easy, we could make this easy," her collage is brought back to the screen shifting between clouds, city, and obstructed views.
Tori is then to a point in the clouds where she is sunk into a deeper consciousness. She shifts to a view where she is floating through stars, giving her a chance to thrust her hips and dance as she goes through a resurrection process of re-birth. The starry tunnel represents a shift to a different world unknown or lost, but soon to be found. After going through this tunnel, all that is remembered is a life of constant stress. Although it is a difficult thing to do, it is almost as if Tori is reminiscing about her life in that stressful state. It is almost as if we as a person are remembering what once was and is soon to disappear. Hence, maybe all this busyness and stress was no big deal in the first place. If we take life more lightly and remember our happy state of mind and sense of self, life will ultimately reach its state of easiness. In a sense, the viewer experiences her destination of ultimate enlightenment in the end. A re-birthing of self, a founding of an ultimate state of grace. It depicts a sense of place as you are one self in the world enlightened.
Furthermore, the main themes that I wanted to bring across here were an ultimate enlightenment of self, finding one's self after a rough time, a return to innocence, and finding that lost world once lost and now found. In this case, it's a world depicting a colorful array of mint trees and red sky. Hence, the phrase of putting the color back into a dull or dead world. I am very pleased with the way the project turned out despite the fact that I could not remove all of the tracking markers and some of the green screen still shows through. I worked really hard keying out most of the green, but I could only do what I was capable of creating here. I am very happy that I now understand the basics of working with three-point edits in Final Cut Pro. It's good to learn just how much this piece of software is capable of doing.
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