Create your own musicless music video for a scene in a video of your choice. Use any variety of sound effects that you personally create or find from sites like freesound.org. And remember add room tone, it will make or break the remix! (Musicless Music Video)

Being already familiar with Mario Wienerroither’s ‘Musicless MusicVideo’, this was one audio assignment that I definitely wanted to do. I have a large collection of music videos that I have downloaded from YouTube and when I started to look through them, Blur’s ‘Parklife‘ pretty quickly became the one I wanted to do. I chose a couple of extracts that didn’t have too much lipsyncing to the vocal of the song allowing space for the substitution of the music with sound effects. The video was imported into Adobe Premiere Pro and the two extracts were edited together on the timeline. I then played the video in small snatches and thought about what sounds could be added.

I used a mixture of Creative Commons sounds downloaded from Freesound and Foley sounds that I created myself using an Edirol R-09HR audiorecorder. I put a bed of downloaded streetnoise across the whole video and downloaded some other sounds that I couldn’t recreate in the office – things like shopping trolleys and car engine noise. This Foley work was a bit slapdash. I just sat at my office desk and used the recorder without an external microphone. I could have taken more care in recording the effects and vocal parts, but I was happy that this was quite a ‘rough and ready’ experiment where I wouldn’t worry too much about the end quality of the audio and the actual creative thinking process was more important than the finished product. However, I think that the overall effect is OK – the quality of the audio is not too detrimental to the end product. Most of the original sounds created are vocal sounds such as ‘Whey’ and ‘Boom’ and words such as ‘Alright’, ‘Mother’ and ‘Starving’. The vocal parts were created to match some of the speech qualities of the actual performers in the video – Damon Albarn and Phil Daniels.

The video and song is one of the first mainstream flowerings of what would come to be called ‘Britpop‘. The video has an exuberance and swagger that typifies some of the meanings around the Britpop culture. The fast editing and bouncy choreography of the ‘Parklife’ music video works perfectly well with the music and mixture of sung and spoken lyrics. Removed of the music and substituted with direct sounds, it still keeps that bouncy exuberance, but it starts to look a bit silly – these young guys look even more juvenile than they perhaps want to be seen. I tried to achieve a comedic effect as a loving homage to the original. It made me smile.