Video of the Moment #2435: The National
I’ve been trying to avoid posting live performance videos in the Video of the Moment slot. That’s what the Live Gig Video slot is for, right? However, I’m going to make an exception for the new one from The National. Why? What they’re offering up, soundtracked by the song ‘Day I Die’, is a wee bit different than most of the live videos we see.
Directed by Casey Reas, it’s intended to be a visual compression of a day of touring, which as you might imagine should come across as pretty frenetic, to turn potentially 24 hours of footage into a presentation of 4 and a half minutes. Reas explains the process: “Graham MacIndoe captured eighteen time-lapse photo series during rehearsals at Le Centquatre in June 2017 in Paris. Hours of rehearsal are compressed into a few minutes. Over five thousand of these photographs were brought together to create the final video. I wrote custom software to collage multiple photographs together and to compile them into videos. A flickering color layer abstracted from broadcast television signals augments the black and white footage. The images are played back at 12fps, near the threshold of the persistence of vision.” The result looks like a cartoon but it’s not a cartoon, it’s something unique and different. Watch he video below. The National’s ‘seventh studio album ‘Sleep Well Beast’ is due for release in a week and a half, on the 8th of September, on 4AD. Our past coverage here on TGTF on The National is through here.
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