The current Corona situation prevents most of us from gathering to rehearse and from being politically active at all, on the one hand out of social responsibility towards those whose health and life is at risk because of the virus and the collapsing health system, but on the other hand because many states are making use of the situation to restrict our possibility to move freely, gather and express ourselves politically, in ways that are not remotely justifiable by a potential risk of infection.
In order to feel more connected, have something to do in times of a lockdown, and to experiment with a new form of action, we have created a collective drumming video, where around 45 people from different countries have sent in their contributions, recording themselves drumming wherever they are.
All the sounds and images combined turn out to create a powerful impression that seems suitable to be used for conveying a political message as well, by shouting slogans or showing banners for example.
Hello, this is wonderful. I am a co-leader of a marching band in New Orleans and we’re brainstorming about ways to come together virtually. I would love to know what kind of software you used? Assuming this was done live. Many thanks.
This was recorded, I am not aware of any way to do something like this live because of latency issues.
I made a recording of the song in advance using the RoR Player and sent it around. People were then recording themselves while listening to the recording on headphones, to make sure that their recordings are properly synchronized with the song. I then used Audacity to edit the audio, to synchronize all the recordings with each other, adjust the volumes and remove the noise. I used Kdenlive to create the video, using the Composite & Transform filter on each video track to align the videos to coordinates that I calculated using a spreadsheet.
Sounds like you know your way around a computer! Awesome, thanks so much for the info, and for the music and inspiration. We have a samba marching group in New Orleans and are scheming.