Blog: Christmas Video Completed

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This morning I finally completed a project what myself, The Validators, and The Items On My List have been working on for LITERALLY MONTHS: this year's Christmas VIDEO!

As regular readers will be aware, work on this began WAY back in September when The Validators exhibited symptoms of Not Exactly Enthusiasm for the song I'd originally written to be this year's Christmas single. The aforementioned Tinsel On My Tree pointed out that she'd already told me a MUCH better idea, for a song about this being out last Christmas in the EU, and upon review it turned out that she was, as ever, CORRECT.

A song was thus written to these new guidelines, a demo version was provided to the Validators, approval was granted, and then the following month we commenced recording sessions. The usual procedures then applied to THIS activity (when you have been in a band together for TWENTY YEARS you do tend to find that your procedures are both DEFINED and COMPREHENSIVE) until the track was HONED to perfection, at which pointed I applied my BRANE to the video.

The story was agreed quite early, following contributions from all stakeholders (I know I always say it, but The Validators really are JOLLY GOOD at this sort of thing - if we ever turn our skills to WORLD DOMINATION then all would fall before us) and the general format, which i can only describe as A MODERN EPISTOLARY NOVEL hem hem, was agreed quite early on, but it took AGES to do the actual IMAGERY. I had originally intended to star in it myself as SANTA, but that just looked RUBBISH. Luckily myself and The Partners In My Partnership found a NEW STAR during a trip to our local department story who suddenly CRYSTALIZED the entire CONCEPT. When you see the video you'll understand what I mean!

Next there was a PHOTOSHOOT, conducted this time by The Pictures In My Album, and then about a FORTNIGHT of putting the whole thing together. For reasons of EASE I ended up assembling the various images in POWERPOINT (again, when you see the video you'll see why I did it that way), which turned out to be a dead good idea, but did involve a LOT of copying, pasting, sizing, text formatting and so on. It took AGES to do but, rather wonderfully, utilising this method meant that EDITING the final video was a piece of CAKE. I even learnt how to force Powerpoint to export slides as high-definition PNG files in the process - I bet Godley and Cream never had to edit THEIR computer's registry when making a video! THEIR LOSS!

There was then a final round of discussion with stakeholders which, again, garnered excellent results. The Validators are pretty much THE BEATLES of ROCK ADMIN - who needs Brit Awards when you can conduct a full virtual team meeting by email and have action points ACTIONED by 7.30am the following day?

The upshot of ALL of this is that the video is now DONE and is ready to be UNLEASHED on Monday morning, alongside the song and indeed the entirety of the revamped Christmas Selection Box album on iTunes, Spotify, and ALL of that sort of thing (unless you're in certain parts of the world, for reasons explained elsewhere, in which case you'll need to get it on bandcamp). It is, I think, going to be QUITE the Thing - not only a lovely Christmas song with a FAB video, but also pretty much GUARANTEED to bring down the government and end Brexit!

posted 30/11/2018 by MJ Hibbett

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