Gianni Arone
● Music videoGianni Arone3:041080pFile 0925-BM

Beyond Measure

A choppy, beat-driven instrumental I composed, cut to itself. Every cut, color burst, datamosh and strobe comes from the audio: kicks punch the frame and flood it with thermal color, snares break it into blocks, hi-hats strobe and retrigger the footage. The picture is all public record: declassified CIA, NSA and FBI files, and Cold War films from the National Archives, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense.

Declassified
↓ Download video (MP4, 1080p) Sources H.264 + AAC · 1920×1080 · 30fps

Photosensitivity warning: this video contains rapid strobing, full-frame flashes and flickering color. Please skip it if you are sensitive to flashing lights.

How it was made Process

  1. Listening. The track was analyzed frame by frame at 30fps: loudness plus separate onset detection for sub/kick, snare/mid and hi-hat bands (about 650 hits over 3 minutes).
  2. Cutting. A director script cuts on strong hits, faster as the track gets louder, and picks each shot's playback: straight, stuttered, reversed, half-speed, or retriggered on every transient.
  3. Datamosh. Real codec datamoshing. Shots were re-encoded as MPEG-4 Part 2, the I-frames of the incoming shot were deleted so its motion vectors push the previous shot's pixels around, and single P-frames were repeated so the image "blooms" and melts. A second, stale-block mosh keeps parts of the last frame alive until the motion in them changes enough.
  4. Glitch & color. Kicks drive zoom punches, shake, RGB channel splits and gradient-map color bursts. Snares drive macroblock corruption. Hi-hats drive strobe bursts, inversions and flash frames.
  5. Paper. Document pages pan across the frame or get multiplied over the footage. No text is laid over the picture: the only words on screen are the ones in the files themselves.

Sources Public domain

All footage and documents are works of the U.S. federal government, retrieved from the Internet Archive's copies of National Archives, DOE, DoD and agency FOIA releases.

Film

Documents