Teleskopes / Official Music Video / 2017

Crystal Clear

Shot by light. Cut by ear.

I came aboard to edit. Then a lighting test cracked open a different film.

Layered red and blue performance exposure from Crystal Clear.
Music
Teleskopes
Release
Stereocilia / six-track release / 2017
Visual concept
Burt Rutherford + Myles Roen
Produced by
Myles Roen
Burt’s role
Direction / camera direction / edit / compositing / color / visual design

Producer Myles Roen had assembled the band, the room and the original retro direction. When the blacked-out set flashed red during a lighting adjustment, I saw the film hiding inside it. We rebuilt the shoot around two practical passes—one red, one blue—with me directing the camera shot by shot.

Over the next month, I cut, layered, mirrored, blended and colored the footage using only an optical-effects vocabulary. The edit follows the way I hear the song: pulling a bass phrase, guitar note or breath to the surface until the music becomes visible.

01

Visual progression

Restraint. Eruption. Release.

The film begins as fragments and blackouts, opens into mirrored doubles and optical corridors, then pulls back before a second crescendo dissolves into magenta. Eight frames tell the arc without turning the page into a frame dump.

Embedded Crystal Clear title inside restrained red and blue haze.
00:16 / Titles in the haze
A blue-lit close view of bass strings and the player’s hand.
00:48 / Sparse fragments
The singer doubled in red and blue as the visual language opens up.
02:37 / First eruption
Layered red and blue performance exposure from Crystal Clear.
02:45 / Double exposure
A mirrored guitar corridor in red, blue and magenta.
03:06 / Mirrored corridor
A kaleidoscopic close view of an eye and guitar strings.
03:19 / Optical geometry
A red fretboard repeated into a rhythmic tunnel.
04:36 / Second crescendo
A symmetrical purple guitar image dissolving toward the outro.
05:11 / Magenta dissolve
02

The constraint

If it couldn’t live in an analog suite, it didn’t belong.

The rule was self-imposed: layering, blending, mirroring, multiple-exposure doubles, symmetry, focus, haze, bloom and rhythmic black. No effect that could not conceptually have existed in an optical or analog edit. The limitation gave the film its grammar.

03

Cut by ear

The arrangement called the shots.

Coverage was sometimes matched between the red and blue passes so a gesture could split, echo or recombine. In the edit, small bass, guitar and performance details surface exactly when their phrases enter the arrangement. The picture does not illustrate the song. It listens to it.

04

Full film / 05:46 / Sound on

Crystal Clear.

Press play to watch the complete official music video with sound. The film loads on demand to keep the page fast.

Click to load / sound on

The outcome

When the band first watched it, the lead singer cried.

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