Sonic Twist® Videos
Sonic Twist® has videos from many of their recordings and performances. Below are links to navigate through their videos:
- Sonic Twist® Videos from CD “Unity.”
- Sonic Twist® Videos from CD “Listen to This.”
- Sonic Twist® Videos from CD “Cloudwalking.”
SONIC TWIST®: PROCESS AND VIDEO
Sonic Twist® in collaboration with Michal Shapiro have created a large body of videos that accompany their “composing in the moment” music, all derived from many hours of recorded sessions.
Initially Judi Silvano and Bruce Arnold recorded in Bruce’s home studio, and the music from “Listen to This” is the result of those sessions. But as the duo continued to create music, and to hone their sound, Bruce thought it would be a good idea to start videotaping the sessions, and so Michal Shapiro was brought in for visual documentation. Shapiro wanted to create watchable performance style videos so she set up a wide shot framing the duo, and used a hand-held camcorder to catch more intimate moments. Two of her paintings were used as backdrops, “Joyful” a color study with a grid-like structure, and “Bells and Whistles” a painting with embedded CDS, cardboard and sand.
At the same time, with the duo’s encouragement, Shapiro was also using other images and footage to create videos in which the musicians were not present. The first of these was “My Neighborhood” a collage of video clips suggested by the lyric of the song. This stepping outside of the performance video genre was the pivotal piece that set Shapiro off on a journey into more abstract, less journalistic visuals. She started to apply some of these ideas to the live performance videos, in an attempt to make them more visually gripping, and more representative of the musical abstraction of the duo.
With the purchase of a portable green screen, there was a leap to much more experimental, imaginatively edited videos. Shapiro started playing with more filters, complex layering of images, and taking the videos into more poetic contexts. In addition, Judi’s background in dance led her to suggest the hiring of a dancer (Maria Mitchell) and studio to create videos for several especially chosen songs, such as “River Crossing,” and “Have and Hold.” Mitchell danced three times to each song, in a 4 camera shoot (Michal, Judi and Bruce teamed up with roaming camcorders, plus the wide shot).
Here is an example that demonstrates a backdrop behind a green screen shoot of Sonic®.
