Pennsylvania-based indie artist, Kyle Meadows recently released Goin’ Down, a new video that represents the first single off his upcoming May album titled "Crossing Corners."
As with most emerging, unsigned artists, it’s a challenge getting your music distributed. With limited funds and no record label backing, Meadows took the matter into his own hands and got creative for the new song.
Describing the video “as an eerie nostalgic home movie from the '90s,” Meadows says his inspiration was “David Lynch’s short film series Rabbits. I’ve always been fascinated by them and how creepy they can look. I had the idea in my head for a while, so I decided to make it into a music video.” The piece is centered around a figure, wearing a spooky rabbit mask, who is later joined by another figure with an equally creepy mask.
To create the piece and get the look he wanted, Meadows shot on a Sony Handycam that he picked up at a local thrift store. “The aesthetic of old home movies from the '80s and '90s is so appealing and beautiful to me, so I wanted to capture that feeling in the video.”
He says that he used the Hi8 camcorder and recorded to a VCR, then sent the VCR footage to a converter box into his computer. He then purposely recorded over damaged VHS tapes so the clips would glitch. All the tracking lines and distortion were recorded off of those tapes and placed in certain spots in the video.
“Also, if you push the rewind button hard while transferring the footage to your computer, it will glitch and give you a really wonderful result. Getting the timing right is tedious though.”
The footage was then imported into Adobe Premiere for editing, where he pieced the clips together as he saw fit, following what he describes as his “mental storyboard.” To complete the piece, he relied on just the basic effects in Premiere. “Fast color correction for higher saturation and an RGB trick, which I learned from watching YouTube tutorials.”