So the whole thing started because I wanted to create an Electro swing song, something I had not tried before, just for the sake of it. Just because I love the genre and wanted to see how it works. Yep.
THE ELECTROSWING CHALLENGE
Once I got the simple groove and drums, something that wanted to make unique was the voice. After recording myself some lines and trying different filters to it so it sounded vintage, it came to my mind, how cool it would be it sounded as Edith Piaf's voice. And that idea continued stuck in my mind until I found myself filtering some Edith Piaf's vocals out of their original song and trying them out.
Surprisengly, they started to fit naturally, even with the accordion sound that usually stands on the same frequencies as her voice in the original. It added great colour so I did not bother removing it further. The challenge itself was the EQ, so every bit on the song sounded even. That took some time but after listening to some results, it was really worth the effort.
MARTIAL ARTISTS DANCING
After working on a first part, before developing the structure of the song any further, I had a thought on who I would like to be dancing to it. I happened to have some scenes of IP Man 3 at that moment. It is a film on Wing Chun, great chinese martial arts, that happened to have a wonderful scene in which the two main actors were dancing. I say wonderful because I quickly noticed its rythm would beautifully fit into the swing of my song.
Since I was mixing two very different worlds, that of swing dancing and the other of martial arts, I thought it would be fun to create a surreal story that would mix both topics in the video. I created a first version with subtitles in Spanish that my friends that practice Wing Chun or dance lindyhop found really funny, and here I am leaving a lighter version for you to watch in English.
The structure of the music part was finished just thinking on that of the video, although sometimes it had to be adjusted the other way around, just because I was creating both things almost at the same time and it was feasible.
SO...
The resulting product is a music video format in which every part (music, visuals and subtitles) are collaborating to create a short story that tries to be tenderly fun, at the same time that Edit Piaf is brought back to life in a song I really hope you all enjoy.