Venulegur Dagur

As part of my efforts to learn Icelandic, I decided to write a song in this very difficult language.  Since I was in the very beginning of my linguistic journey, I had no chance of writing meaningful lyrics and had to concentrate instead on making them rhyme at all costs.  I ended up with an incredibly nonsensical song.

I decided that the accompanying music video would be a series of short clips, each presenting one line of the lyrics.  This presented a fun opportunity to write many extremely short films, and the creative endeavor of coming up with unique ways to showcase lyrics was a blast.  The real challenge to this ended up being the props.  Once I had ideas for each vignette, I set about making the materials to make them a reality.  I used Adobe Illustrator to make print graphics for wine labels, airplane inserts, coupon sheets and maps.  I screen printed t-shirts, decorated cookies and wrote lyrics in chalk on the sidewalk.  Each line was an adventure, and I have a new respect for prop departments.

I also used Adobe AfterEffects to create a bottom third animation and end tag that I included into my project and used Premier’s green screen capabilities.  This video was a great learning experience on coordinating the the various applications in the Adobe Creative Suite in a single project.

Since I decided to make an Icelandic version as well as an English version, each prop and each scene had to be duplicated.  This one was a real journey, but the end result is as weird as the song itself.