It all started with this screenshot. While editing the other night, I was messing around with the tonal range of a particular clip, and as a result of a beautiful accident, I got this image. Check the "mask" box when you're color correcting on Adobe, and see what happens to your footage... For a reason still unknown to me, I fell in love with this image. A simple frame captured on the beach turned into a picture that looked like it was taken on the moon. The sand resembled craters. The sea, which turned pitch black, was now a starless sky, perhaps a black hole. I had this strange feeling of reaching for the unknown, visiting far away places.
The next day, I was listening to a forgotten album on my iPod. It was Madvillain's Madvillainy, which came out in 2004. My favorite song on that album is Shadows Of Tomorrow featuring Lord Quas, and as I listened to it on the subway, I couldn't stop thinking of that black and white image on my screen. Shadows Of Tomorrow is a lot about our relation to time, and what we make of the past, present, and the future. It's melody is a bit eerie, and I'm sure it would affect everybody differently. I put the song on repeat and thought about making a music video for it. I thought about how I'd reach out to Madvillain, what I would say, how I'd try to convince them so they'd let me do it, etc. I thought of an astronaut dancing to the song, galaxies colliding, black holes swallowing stars.
When I got to the office, I looked up the song online and found out that there's already a music video for it (of course!). For whatever reason, it had never occurred to me to search for it before. And there it was. An impressive video that goes greatly with this song, almost entirely made of found footage, including an image of an astronaut and the view of planet Earth from outer space. I guess I wasn't too far off with my interpretation of the song, and my imagination ran parallel to the director's.
All this reminded me of how valuable found footage and b-rolls are when it comes to making videos. Of course, creating something from scratch is extremely gratifying, but putting existing footage together and creating something beautiful out of it can be as impressive. I remember when Abel Ferrara was shooting his last film, 4:44 - The Last Day on Earth, there was a whole crew responsible for finding footage of the Dalai Lama, the recent political riots and disasters, and news clips from major networks. All this was included in the film, and the story couldn't have been told without those b-rolls.
On Film Annex, we have an entire library of Public domain footage, including movie classics, videos from NASA, amazing old TV series like Superman and Dick Tracy, cartoons like Tom & Jerry and Popeye, films from the National Archive, and hundreds of other videos that are hard to come by. In fact, Film Annex is the only platform on the web that presents these valuable films on channels dedicated to each series and organization. The more I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that our Open Film Library needs more exposure, and gradually, it should become the go-to destination for everyone searching for found footage. Whether you're a filmmaker, a music video director, a documentary-maker, Film Annex's online film network can be the ultimate stop. And making these videos available for download, or at least enabling users to send requests for download might be an option to think about.
Now that I think of it, it was no surprise that the video for Shadows of Tomorrow was a mix and mash, as the song itself is partially made of found melodies, which is the case with a lot of MC-producer/DJ-created tunes. Madvillain integrated a speech by Sun Ra into the song, which again goes perfectly with the song's lyrics. The song ends with Sun Ra's words, "Equation wise, the first thing to do is consider time as officially ended... we'll work on the other side of time..." How cool would it be if someone made a song and integrated the speech of MLK into it and then did a great mix and mash video with found footage? Maybe, someone already did it.
-- Eren
