Crazy

Sheer brilliant productions are inspired, inspired by the brilliance of technique and collaboration, in turn creating insight into design. When Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green collaborated as Gnarls Barkley and released Crazy in 2006 we all stopped to listen and watch the video directed by Robert Hales.

Watch the original here, as Youtube/Gnarls and Co. have stopped embedded sharing for this video.

Laughing Squid posted Randy George of The Ether and Aether Experiment cover of Crazy, highlighting the mastery of the Theremin – an instrument with complete hands off approach to performing music. Here, watch in awe.

The Gnarls Barkley collaboration, the ‘touchlessness’ of Randy’s performance and the many many inspired productions based upon Crazy show the real values in design, production and distribution – that being the ability to learn and build upon what inspires and challenges you.

When I was playing around with Flitter (in the same way as Karsten and Tim had. Do check out their uber mashup screensaver Fotzam) , I was interested in the video synthesis possibilities that were built upon RSS based services.

I wondered if I could take the Flitter experiment and reference the ‘culture of Crazy‘ – so this is what I did: –

First, Googled for the lyrics of Crazy. Not so hard. [Link]

Copied the lyrics into a Google spreadsheet and generated an RSS feed from that. [Link]

Used Feedburner to stablise the RSS feed [Link]

Added the new stable RSS to a cloned Flitter application on Yahoo!Pipes so that I could call Flickr images relating to the lyrics from Crazy. [Link]

Took the Yahoo!Pipes output RSS feed to the VVVV Flitter application and hacked it so that I could get the mirror image/Rorschach effect. Mixed in the elements of this crazy patch to get a sense of space.

Record 5 minutes of live RSS video mixing straight out of VVVV and then using the Microsoft Movie Maker, mixed in the Randy George cover by using DownloadHelper Firefox extension to aquire the Youtube video and then ripping the audio using FLV Extract.

And this is what you get.

No where in the same league as any of the above productions, athough it’s seductive to watch the endlessness of the locally running VVVV client. The client app grabs fresh images in batches of 50 just like Twittervision grabs tweets.

Now, I know using the lyrics and ripping the audio is technically ‘fair use’ as what I’m trying to demonstrate is the possibilities of design, production and distribution that can be achieved through web services by using media that itself is based upon free access. Through association, it’s Semantic Broadcasting. But, as described in the whole process of making my version of Crazy, it’s not straight forward nor is it generally accepted to build upon peoples work. I’m just exploring the possibilities of design, production and distribution. Is that so crazy?

From the ever correct Wikipedia:-

The song’s lyrics, written by Cee-Lo, were inspired by a conversation he and Danger Mouse had in the studio with the instrumental playing on repeat: Danger Mouse was “caught up in thinking that people have to believe you’re crazy to think you’re an artist. After the conversation, Cee-Lo recorded the vocals for the song in just one take.” [Link]

That’s real time improvisation over a foundation of production delivering authentic media. Sweet.

If anyone wants the VVVV patch, leave a message below.

Update: You can grab the patch from here. [Link] . Enjoy.