When seeking for “free footage” of “green screen” on the Internet, you will find (it was 2015ish, ed.note) mainly elements borrowed from the imaginary of war: gunshots, bombs, explosions, weapons, soldiers, helicopter gunships, mage tanks. You will also find fantastic creatures: dinosaurs, dragons, unicorns, Jean Claude Van Damme. The latter (hero of many action movies) decided to release free use of movies in “green screen” portraying himself fighting, shooting, jumping, suffering, so everyone can enrich their video with an unexpected “Hollywood” element. I decided to compose a story using all the clips made by Jean Claude, making them communicate with the other creatures I have found, trying to give each of these clips a different dignity and trajectory than the one for which they were created, i.e. simple visual addenda of other pre-existing narratives. The name comes from a mispronunciation that unintentionally appeared during the first public screening at the Leopolda Station in Florence in 2015: the hero we follow is not Jean Claude Van Damme, but Jean Cloud.
Even though the visual part of it departs from those exact reasons I described up here, the video was initially silent. It was supposed to be like that for an art project called UDS. Unità di sonorizzazione is a project by Enrico Gabrielli, Sergio Giusti and ENECEfilm (2015). Here from their website:
Unità di Sonorizzazione is a musical performance simulating an assembly line; it is a re-elaboration of the performance created to make the film “Unità di Produzione Musicale”. The project is based on the idea of experimentally reformulating a musical genre and the musician’s craft, simulating a means of musical production based on assembly line labour with all its features of mechanical routine.
During the performance 24 musician/workmen divided into teams will produce music, working in pre-arranged shifts: eight will sit at a table and for 7 minutes will write a score based on the video shown on the monitor in front of them. These scores will then be played by eight other performers, seated in front of music stands, to add a soundtrack to the video to be projected for the audience. Three overseers will dictate the times of the shifts, mixing the various performers between the writing and playing sessions and giving out the scores to the various participants according to a pre-arranged plan.
This shift cycle will continue for an overall time of two hours. During the shift strict rules will be in place – no smoking, no alcohol, silence among those musicians momentarily not working – and the overseers will ensure these are respected. A supervisory, quality-control figure will also be present, having the discretion, as the work progresses, to manage and direct the sound-adding processes and orientate the writing sessions. The projections will be coordinated by the two workers responsible who will ensure that projection times coincide with the shift times of the performance.
The original performance at the Stazione Leopolda of Firenze, with 24 musicians playing live and improvising the whole thing:
A group picture during the performance, you can see both the spectators and some musicians here and there, oddly enough, nobody is looking at their phones… 2015
Backstage video of Sergio Giusti giving instructions
Backstage video during one of the performances, damn… also here, nobody is looking at the phone!
I liked the improvisation and it was very moving that night. But after a while I wanted the video to have a voice of its own. I thought that that voice was going to narrate exactly what I had in mind, and since my background of music composer was very into orchestral compositions, I decided to compose a “aria”:
I had a lucky chance to get to know Giordano Ferri, a tenor which felt like helping me out with the sung part of the aria. I wish one day I will be able to play it with a proper orchestra, not made of VST plug-ins.
Down here you can see the aria leaflet: