January 14, 2008

Beautiful Ground

Lovely fan-created video for Grandaddy's "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)," found via if:book.

the if:book post details the video better than I can at the moment, except to say that Grandaddy kept me going through several late nights during graduate school, and that this is wonderful example of constrained writing/animation (see the creator's statement below).

Just came across something lovely. Video for "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)" by the now disbanded Grandaddy from their great album The Sophtware Slump (2000). Jed is a character who weaves in and out of the album, a forlorn humanoid robot made of junk parts who eventually dies, leaving behind a few mournful poems.

Creator Stewart Smith: "I programmed this entirely in Applesoft BASIC on a vintage 1979 Apple ][+ with 48K of RAM -- a computer so old it has no hard drive, mouse up/down arrow keys, and only types in capitals. First open-source music video, code available on website. Cinematography by Jeff Bernier." A nice detail of the story is that this was originally a fan vid but was eventually adopted as the "official" video for the song.

Posted by Jason at January 14, 2008 8:09 AM | TrackBack