Synchronized Montage Serendipity

When R.E.M. released their Accelerate album last year, they posted several clips of the band performing Supernatural Superserious and asked fans to make their own music videos and post them on YouTube. There were some great efforts, but the current collection is a shambles because many have been pulled down or had their audio removed thanks to the overzealous automated copyright infringement police.

I recently got a takedown notice for my submission and promptly objected on the grounds that the copyright owners did in fact give their permission. My video has been restored but the whole incident brought the song to mind again and I thought I'd try something different with the material that R.E.M. made available.

Among the clips there were four that were live acoustic performances. I thought it would be interesting to see if PluralEyes could sync them up. The audio was pretty different, but it worked. This says something both about how robust PluralEyes is and how tight R.E.M. is as a band.

After syncing the clips I applied an ImageFlow montage generator with mostly random parameters. The result is a music video that works, thanks to some technology that gives serendipity a chance.

Update: HD version of the video available on YouTube here.