The Unfolding

You might think I've done nothing this past week, since I've posted nothing. You're almost right. But in addition to nothing, in my free time I visited some very old architecture here in Moundsville, West Virginia (where I've been for the past two weeks), visited a Hare Krishna temple (more on that soon; I took pictures), and I've seen more movies and done a lot of reading during slow times at work. During my shift this morning (I've been working midnight to noon) I went to one of my favorite websites, NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day archive, and downloaded several dozen amazing images. I imported the photos to iMovie, and also a song by Lisa Gerrard, and made a slideshow. This could have been done in two minutes, but since I'm a perfectionist with time on my hands, it took a couple hours. I uploaded it to Facebook, but I'd like to share it here, too.

A note on the song. Lisa Gerrard is best known for her vocal contributions to movie soundtracks such as Gladiator (which is where I discovered her), and from her hippie band Dead Can Dance. Her voice is amazing, very deep and surreal. The song I used is called The Unfolding, from her album Duality. It's probably my favorite of hers, and every time I hear it I see the vastness of space in my mind, so I thought the NASA images would be appropriate. I can't get enough nebula pictures! This song is in my blog playlist, as well as a song that didn't make it into the Gladiator soundtrack calledRome Is the Light, which is listed under Hanz Zimmer but features Lisa Gerrard's voice. I hope you enjoy it; let me know what you think!

UPDATE: A friend of mine offered me some space on his iDisk (Apple's online storage service, which is very nice but I'm not prepared to spend $99/year for) to upload the high quality original movie file of this slide show. The file is 128MB, and the resolution is 960x540, so much better than it looks here or on Facebook.

Click here to get to my buddy's iDisk, and download The Unfolding.m4v. Quicktime or VLC should play the file no problem, and of course iTunes, since that uses Quicktime.

Also, Facebook took the video down because WGM apparently doesn't take kindly to people using their artists' music without permission. It's understandable; I mean, they probably lost millions of dollars because I made that slideshow. Seriously, Lisa Gerrard is a really well-known musician, and now thousands of people who were planning to buy her album won't because they can just play this video. Surely there's no one out there who would never have heard her name if not for that video who might now be curious about her music, that would never happen because they all know her from Gladiator! No, that would never happen. There's no way this might turn out to have been free advertising for an artist signed by WGM.

Resentful sarcasm aside, you can still watch it if you download the original file, which I recommend anyway.

If you download it, leave me feedback; I might give obscure artists more free advertising like this in the future!