My students and I have been enjoying the recent “Literal Video” trend.

Basically this involves taking a well known video to a pop song (typically) and rewriting the lyrics to comment on, or just state, what is going on in the video; this new lyric is then recorded with the song’s instrumentals and the new construct is posted for giggles.

In fact, though, these are not actually “literal videos” of the songs’ lyrics; instead, they are existing videos with new lyrics that describe them literally. To put it plainly, the efforts that are so amusing are misnamed: they are more literally “Literal Lyrics to Famous Videos,” though that, of course, is not a tripping sort of name.

But we could, in fact, fashion more literal literal videos. How about this: working in teams or in relay, people can work on a series of steps towards creating these. Kind of a chain:

  1. A new, original song should be written that consists of descriptions of what can conceivably appear in a video–either stock footage, new footage, or a real challenge to video makers. The song can be in any style. The song should be recorded as desired. NOTE: This set of lyrics can serve as a verbal ‘storyboard’ for the ensuing video.
  2. A video maker, possibly the same people or maybe another set of people, creates a video that embodies the lyrics’ descriptions…but which somehow make a reasonably smooth and cogent video in its own right.
  3. A third (or second) party, viewing the video and listening to the song and lyrics, now creates a new lyric that can reasonably harmonize the video plus the musical style and cues, and that sounds cogent enough to be a song, again in its own right.
  4. This sequence might continue in waves for quite a while–for example, taking these new lyrics and writing new music to go with it; creating a new video to go with the new song; rewriting these lyrics to match the video; etc. etc. etc.

Sounds like fun to me!

I’d love to see someone tackle this at any level. For a bonus, you might just emulate the many new “Literal Videos” that are on YouTube and such, writing new lyrics to songs with existing videos. Or, you could try the steps (or some of them) as I propose above. You should share these with me and with Yuntech students (or allow me to share them with my students, at least…).

So, have at thee! I will try this new idea if I have the time.

Side projects suggest themselves, too, such as comparing the step 3 lyrics with the original step 1 songwriters’ original concepts for what sort of song they were imagining.

Any ricochets or tangents come to mind? Please comment! If you would like to collaborate with me on such a project, I’m quite willing to talk about it! We can collaborate at Google Wave or Google Docs, or in some other fashion.

Now let’s get creative, people!

ADDENDUM:

(12/12/09)

I want to suggest a sort of shortcut–or possibly, for some, an inspiring alternative to writing a brand new song. What about if you pick some instrumental piece which you like and write new “literal” lyrics for it? I know that Midnight Oil, for instance, has some great instrumentals such as “Gravelrash” that might work great. The audio then would be already available; only lyrics would be needed. . . Whatcha think?

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