The concept of this visual music piece was guided largely by my individual interpretation of the assigned audio. I very clearly identified notions of beginning, climax, and end in the song: steadily-building anticipation, followed by full-blown whimsical chaos, and ending with a flourishing finale. Above all else, I felt a sense of optimism seep through the entirety of the audio, carefree and unabiding, which inspired my decision to use the assignment as an opportunity to explore the simple pleasures of life. I had instinctively associated each self-identified “segment” of the music with an event, object, and/or symbol that I used video footage so as to enrich the experience visually. I kept true to my initial vision of the music as a story with a beginning, middle, and end by linking each of my instinctive associations together into a sequence, a progression of time. Waking up to a warm cup of coffee, receiving an unexpected gift, settling into the comfort of a long, peaceful drive, soaking in the cheap thrills of an amusement park, sharing a moonlit kiss.
Furthermore, I made a deliberate choice to only use older 1950s-1960s video footage in my visual music piece in order to convey two key messages. Firstly, the older footage--with its low resolution and primitive digital technology in relation to modern day--is reminiscent of “simpler times”, accentuating that the process of deriving joy is often straightforward, uncomplicated, simple. The second message involves the fact that the decades-old footage depicts things that can instill pleasure in our lives, that people today still relate to. I interpreted this as the idea that the feeling of joy has been, and will likely continue to be, universal throughout history.