A good and productive weekend in Irvine.
Pull out your map and trace it. Alyssa lives in a small COMMUNITY in Irvine. Apartment buildings circle a pool and fitness center. Kids bicycle and scramble all around the streets. And her roommates are out of town. So here I tell my own roommates “will you feed the cat, I believe I will be in Irvine all weekend.”
And here in our hull up we began and completed MASSIVE PROJECTS. Two music videos, the May newsletter (which hopefully you received), and a song with Larek (my former guitar student, a young genius).
The first night we filmed Leave Your Husband. We had walked to the Albertsons and were clowning trying to make a good TikTok video. I dramatically recited the lyrics while waving my arms wildly. Then I thought “what if I did this for the whole song… and what if we put the actual song on top of it!? Then we'd have a music video!! And we could add a bunch of cool effects in the computer software!"
Well we rushed home and filmed a one take wonder. It was now past midnight but we were not deterred. I walked down the street saying “Leave your husband, he's f*cked” and various other insane proclamations. Returning home I struggled to find a program to edit the footage on. My computer hard drive is completely out of storage and Alyssa's computer had a virus. So what was I to do??? After a bit of research I found KAPWING, a browser based video editing software. You know what the means??? No downloads!! It takes up no space.
So I threw the single video into the software and carefully synced it with the song. Now it was time to press “Erase background,” which erased the suburban backdrop and replaced it with a solid color… what color did I choose, I'm trying to remember. I believe it was blue?? In any case, the video was done!! And many people emailed me saying they were relieved to see such a raw and DIY video in this landscape of perfect nonsense. I'm facetious here – no one messaged.
It was late when we fell asleep beneath stars in the backyard. In the morning Larek came over and we repeated the music video process, this time with a song called You Took It All For Granted, a sad ballad about addiction and suicide. I walked down the street with an acoustic guitar, miming the words. Larek followed and made dramatic dancing gestures. I edited the footage together with special effects such as explosions and robot dogs between takes of a song Larek and I recorded together. Mostly I plugged in the mic and pressed record on the computer while he played some guitar and sang. But I will add my Watson touches to the song eventually and we will hopefully release it as a colab.
We pushed the video and rode bikes to the Albertsons again. There was a Starbucks with delicious breakfast sandwiches. Larek told us remarkable stories of his unfolding youth, and we felt bittersweet for our own longgone adolescence. He left and accidentally stole my cable which was plugged into his mic >: (
At night we watched my favorite Twilight Zone Episode Come Wander With Me. The last episode they filmed. And I stayed the night again and she called out of work in the morning. But it was Monday and I had to go. So I went to the front door and said goodbye. The sun was coming down, it was already hot. The work week was upon us. And that was how we got the two new music videos. Please enjoy.
-Watson