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January 8, 2009

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Photo by Joey Berlin

Combine a dark folk story song with a classic old-school murder weapon and some blood spatter, and you’ve got the building blocks for an eye-catching music video.

Finding a large number of eyes to catch it, though, would’ve been a lot harder 10 years ago — or even five — unless you were established in the video business or happened to know someone at, say, Geffen Records.

Now, with technological wonders like Internet sensations MySpace and YouTube, anything’s possible for both video producers and musicians. Together, two Emporians and a Lawrence musician are helping each other explore what those possibilities could mean for their artistic pursuits.

Gazette graphic designers Justin Ogleby and Brady Scott founded Medium Obscura as an outlet for their design artwork, but soon found themselves producing music videos.

They recently finished their second video, giving visual life to “The Sad Song of Sequin Island” by Christian Williams.

Brady Scott

Edward and Stacy Ruggiero are the actors for the music video “The Sad Song of Sequin Island.”

Both Medium Obscura and Williams have pages on MySpace, the popular social networking site, dedicated to their work.

The video can be found on both those pages as a link from YouTube, the most famous of a group of sites that allows everyone from self-medicated high school dropouts to presidential candidates to post just about any kind of video.

“It’s just completely free, basically, and not just money,” Scott said.

“Complete creative freedom, and you don’t have to shell out a billion dollars to do it. You put it up, and anybody in the world can see it. Anyone can just check it out.

“You do it for the sake of doing it, so it looks cool, just cause you enjoy doing it.”

Ogleby and Scott began their video-producing venture last summer.

Scott found a Wisconsin band called Those Poor Bastards on MySpace and liked their music. He and Ogleby contacted the Bastards and offered to put together a video for them.

“We figured that it’d be fun, whether they liked the video or not,” Ogleby said. “So we went ahead and made a video, and it took several weeks to get everything shot and edited and all that, and showed it to them. They really liked it and put it on their Web site.”

Brady Scott

Justin Ogleby, right, tapes a scene for a music video with singer and songwriter Christian Williams at Reading Lake.

Williams had moved to Lawrence from Milwaukee last summer. He saw the video on Those Poor Bastards’ Web site and contacted Ogleby and Scott to see if they could do a video for him.

A fan of paranormal phenomena, Williams based “The Sad Song of Sequin Island” on a ghost story he found on the Internet about the Sequin Island Lighthouse in Georgetown, Maine. It’s considered one of the country’s most haunted lighthouses.

“Like any good folk story, there are a lot of different versions explaining why the lighthouse is haunted,” he said in an e-mail message. “I took the outline of the version I found the most interesting and filled in the details, essentially crafting a traditional murder ballad.”

The video follows the story line of the song: A husband buys his bored wife a piano. She begins spending all her time playing, so much so that it drives her husband nuts. He begins hearing her music even when she isn’t playing, such as when the two of them are laying in bed.

“She sensed he wasn’t sleeping/She told him to relax,” Williams sings. “She tried to help by playing/And he thanked her with his ax.”

After hitting his wife with the ax and splattering her blood across the painting hanging over the piano, the husband tosses her body in the ocean — or in this case, Reading Lake, where the video’s outdoor scenes were shot.

The ability to post on sites like YouTube allows Williams, who just finished recording his fourth self-released album, the same kind of freedom it allows Ogleby and Scott.

“MySpace and YouTube allow me to share music on my own terms,” Williams said. “I can literally write a song in the morning, record it in my closet studio in the afternoon and have it up on the Internet for the world to hear by the same evening.”

Brady Scott

Heather Botzet, left, and Stacy Ruggiero bundle up while watching the filming of the music video at Reading Lake.

The fact that YouTube is notoriously clogged with silly video clips of questionable quality, and sometimes-objectionable subject matter, doesn’t bother him.

“It’s true that there is a lot of nonsense masquerading as art on MySpace and YouTube,” he said, “but the simple fact remains that if it’s good, it’ll stand up to the test of time and still be there when someone finally gets around to finding it.”

Scott said he doesn’t know how far he and Ogleby plan to go with producing videos.

They have two non-music videos in preproduction. Eventually, Scott said, they’d like to build up a portfolio to take to film festivals and see how theirs stack up against other filmmakers.

“We’ll ride it as long as we can,” he said. “As long as it’s fun, as long as people are watching our stuff.”

ON THE NET:

Medium Obscura: http://myspace.com/mediumobscura

Christian Williams: http://www.christianwilliams.net

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