Sometimes it's hard to be a woman - especially if you are fighting off an alien invasion.
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Version A (date)
MPEG (28.7 MB, VCD Quality, 352x240)
RealVideo (4.7 MB, Low Quality, 320x240)
DVD (101 MB zipped, DVD Quality, 720x480)
Music Credits
"Stand by Your Man" from the album Stand by Your Man
Written by Tammy Wynette and Billy Sherrill ©1968
Performed by Tammy Wynette
Description of the Video
This song juxtaposes the country standard "Stand by Your Man", a song about the everyday domestic problems a woman faces, with a woman in the Old West fighting off invading aliens with the help of her alien lover.
^ TOPThe Making of the Video
This was originally supposed to be a ReBoot video with Matrix and AndrAIa. The idea was to contrast this simple song with scenes of violent fighting, giving double meanings to many of the lyrics. However I couldn't find scenes that fit my vision. ReBoot is a fairly non-violent show. I finally decided to shoot something completely new using The Movies.
One interesting challenge in this song is that the tempo changes. In these days of electronics, songs keep the same rigid tempo throughout. In this one, although you can't hear the difference, the measures vary wildly in length meaning I had to manually find all the measure breaks.
When I was trying to make this a ReBoot video, I was playing The Movies. While in story mode, I ended up making two movies about an Old West saloon girl named Emma McGun fighting off aliens. I decided that she and her alien boyfriend would make a better characters for this since I could control the action.
As an example of the kind of double meaning I was looking for, I really wanted a scene of them fighting back to back against an oncoming horde for one of the "Stand by your man" lines. I couldn't do that specifically, but all of them involved her standing by his side fighting.
"Give him two arms to cling to" is another example. And I really wanted a flamethrower for "...something warm to come to..." but had to settle for a bazooka.
Although this looks finished, it was really what I call a "concept draft". I just slapped a bunch of scenes together to see if the idea worked. There are lots of timing, clipping, and continuity errors (like the way they keep switching sides in the final battle) that I didn't bother fixing. Had I done another draft, I would have reshot the entire video with new sets, costumes, props, and so on.
My long-term plans were to use this as a trailer for mini-movies about her. However all of this was derailed when I came to the conclusion that The Movies was a steaming pile. It was a mediocre tycoon game and a mediocre movie maker and ultimately fairly useless for making videos.
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