I had a bit of a revelation this morning.
A couple of weeks ago, I produced a video to be shown at a Conference in the UK, for a few hundred people. I'd never produced a video before, yet through the wonderful world of free software and Creative Commons, I was able to produce a decent enough effort. The music that I used was licenses under a CC license, allowing for dstribution and reuse - so that the people I made the video for can take excerpts without having to break the law.
I've now been asked to make a video to be shown at my old secondary school, which is going to require a different soundtrack, and possibly a different focus. Over the next year, I'm going to be generating loads of audiovisual content, and was looking for a good way to make sure that this content could be used to help stoke an interest in the injustice faced by many of the future subjects of my photographs.
I wathced a talk given @ #Ted (TED2009 started today!) by Bono. That "Rock Musician with a cause." He observed that the problem in Africa isn't an issue of charity, but an issue of justice. Charity is about regaining the status quo, bringing people up to a level. Justice is about allowing people the chance to survive.
It was this tenous music link that set me up with my latest idea.
#tweetband
The first stage is to get the basic layout of a song. ABACAB I think is a fairly universal layout, and a nice simple one to start with. I therefore need a chord progression for:
A
B
C
Once that's done, we can set a time signature and tempo (I think we should go for something simple to start with, like 4/4 and 120bpm).
Then, we get a few people to contribute some lyrics.
Once this is all done, people can go away, and record bits of the song on however many instruments they like, and send me each track. I will then mix them all together and add photos to create a streaming video.
It's worth a try, so if anyone can get the ball rolling, just use the #tweetband tag on twitter, get people seeing the idea, and let's get the ball rolling!