The core of the Esther video is made up of 118 chalk pastel drawings
that follow the song's narrative, each one illustrating a portion of
the lyrics. After sketching out a rough storyboard for the video as
a whole, I created the drawings in two hardbound, 7 3/4" x 10 1/2"
sketchbooks. The sewn-in bindings of this kind of sketchbook kept
the drawings from moving around and smudging too much as I worked my
way through them. When the drawings were finished, I cut the
bindings off of the sketchbooks (which left a white margin of about
an inch on the left side of the image), and scanned each drawing
into the computer. After cropping the scans and cleaning up the
images in Photoshop, I imported them into a new program called
Macromedia Director (1.0!) and began the arduous process of setting
up the cuts and synchronizing them to the music (the music had been
converted into a digital file using SoundEdit).
Once all of sections of the video were timed out in Director, I
placed markers for the key frames in the SoundEdit file of the song
- PACo would use these markers in conjunction with an HPI file (for
HyperCard-PACo Interface) to actually display the video in its final
form. It was in both Director and PACo that I set up most of the
simple computer art tricks that were displayed over the instrumental
sections of the song. Some of these were basically just rotating the
image 90 degrees four times, making a loop of it, and then setting
the program to cycle through several color palettes (what were
called Look-Up Tables, or LUTs) over time. This had the effect of
switching the colors assigned to each pixel in a continuously
changing fade, which achieved a kind-of, sort-of psychedelic effect.
For one sequence, I used the program SuperPaint to draw some Keith
Haring-esque outlines around one of the pastel images showing a
figure in silhouette, and set them bouncing around the figure in
little two- or three-frame animations, which I also made loops of
and cycled the palettes on. For another, I created a series of
drawings with SuperPaint to make up the frames of a quick little
animation showing a window turning into flames and then into an
angry version of the classic smiley face. I also used several of the
features that Director had available to fade from one image to
another and superimpose one image over another.
The whole process took most of the spring of 1991 to complete, and
when I left CoSA in May of that year there were still a lot of
editing tweaks to be done, as well as preparation of the final,
multi-megabyte file to be played through PACo. After I departed, the
video was handed over to the newly-hired John Greene, who is
credited on the final video as Editor/Technical Producer. Truth to
tell, my memory of how much I left for him to do is a bit hazy, but
I'm sure it was pretty substantial. So here's a belated thank-you
for doing a great job, John - hopefully you'll get a chance to read
this now after all these years!
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