The word of the week is Lo-Fi!

i’ll be taking a bit of video i made and other video from the great internet archive for a good ol’ music video. For which song, you may ask? You’ll have to find out. The idea is taking all of that footage from digital means back into analog tape (vhs). Then that same footage from that tape gets recorded to another vhs tape, then back to the previous and so on and so fourth. In other words, i’ll be looping this video through two tapes, hopefully degrading the quality further as it passes. The trick here is getting that video BACK into my computer. don’t know how i’ll manage that.

i didn’t have the videos ready at the moment, so i did record some music (notably Strangers and a bit of Nova Scotia from Artificial Horizon) onto a VHS. I then proceeded to remove the tape and crumple it up with my hands and smeared my fingers all on the top side of the tape. Then i neatly rolled it back into the case. The result is a beautiful warble effect:

Strangers / Nova Scotia (Lo-Fi) by the chief of thieves

i also plan to get a tape deck and do the same thing, only with cassettes.

at one point, i did manage to get the vhs tape stuck, for whatever reason. I had to open the VCR and see how i could manually remove it. In defense, the VCR managed to give me a nasty cut on the thumb. I got the tape out but now i have to leave the cover off to manually push the tape downward, if i’m inserting a new one. not a big deal, really.