Scratch Video a mutant hybrid of scratch DJ music and guerrilla TV

scratchvideo/design/editors

Scratch video editors use software to create videos which synch image and sound. Depending on their background (traditional film or video editing, animation, music production, multimedia art, etc.), there are a few different methods used to make scratch video with a personal computer. Video editing software can loop existing sounds and images from video samples, eventually creating layers of music. The same software is also used to interpretively edit images to match existing music. Music designed in MIDI-based audio programs can be synched to video using trigger software, creating perfect continuity between image and sound.

Scratch video editors don't fit into established categories of the music business, which traditionally separates people who make music from people who create images. Even more confusing is what to label their completed projects -- the title music video is already taken. The term album means "a collection usually in book form of literary selections, musical compositions, or pictures." (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary 68)

If the term "album" can be applied to different media as "a collection", why not video? Examples of scratch video albums include the Emergency Broadcast Network's Commercial Entertainment Product and Coldcut and Hexstatic's collaboration on the CD-ROM portion of Let Us Play.

Wave Twisters, which will be released in the summer of 2000, is a collaboration spawned when world renowned turntablist Q-Bert (of the Invizibl Skratch Piklz) and his character designer Dug-One teamed up with directors Eric Henry and Syd Garon. Wave Twisters is a Fantasia-like animated version of Q-Bert's full- length album of the same name, a movie where characters speak in samples. DJ Q-Bert says "I wanted to do something different that people would trip out on. I'm sick of all these videos that are stupid, and I wanted to something totally opposite and different." (Snider 47) He ended up making a video for every track on his album so he could tell the whole story of a civilization living inside a record needle. The Wave Twisters movie is a Q-Bert album you can both watch and listen to, or a scratch video album.

Copyright 2000© Hart Snider