A remix of remixes: Gotye’s ‘Somebodies’
Gotye, aka Wally (born Wouter) De Backer, has been getting massive attention for his song "Somebody That I used To Know."
In fact, people feel compelled to give this song their own special treatment, video record it, and put it up on the web. Here's one example:
As the tributes and remakes piled up, Gotye was inspired to go one step further:
Here's how he explains it:
Reluctant as I am to add to the mountain of interpretations of Somebody That I Used To Know seemingly taking over their own area of the internet, I couldn't resist the massive remixability that such a large, varied yet connected bundle of source material offered.
I was directly inspired here by Kutiman's Thru-You project:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tprMEs-zfQA
Wonderful stuff!
Thankyou to everyone who has responded to Somebody That I Used To Know via YouTube. It's truly amazing!
All audio and video in Somebodies is from the YouTube user videos featured, each of them a cover or parody of Somebody That I Used To Know. No extra sounds were added to the mix, but I used some EQ, filtering, pitch-shifting and time-stretching to make the music.
I avoided using any existing remixes of the song, or any covers from tv talent shows.
As comprehensive and extensive as I tried to be with my downloading of source videos, I know there are many clips that I missed. Tay Zonday's cover for instance, no internet mashup should be without him.
I used KeepVid.com to download the YouTube videos, Ableton Live for audio stretching, pitch-shifting and the initial video editing, and Adobe's After Effects to put the final video together.
Big thanks to Travis Banko for assistance with downloading source videos, and to James Bryans for After Effects tutelage.
Thankyou to Barry for being Barry, and guiding us all.
Thanks to you for listening
Wally
A full list of links to the original videos is available here:
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