Califone Make An Interactive Tumblr Music Video

A 16 year old once told me that he could walk around Birmingham city centre and pick out people that he recognised from their Tumblr pages. He was probably a massive stalker, but it led me to believe that the microblogging service was simply a platform used by teenagers to promote their own self-brand.

But a new music video, produced for Chi-town hailing band Califone, is a touch more pleasing than adolescents posting selfies with Helvetica type-faced “live, love, laugh” platitudes plastered all over them. It’s for the track “Stitches”, and it’s about as interactive as you can get, without actually being able to touch stuff. Accessible through a secret link on the band’s Tumblr, the video features a bunch of images that have been meticulously pulled from various other Tumblr pages. They’re all super interesting and engaging, with not a single Amarro filter or inspirational quote in sight. No image features twice, and you can bring ones of interest forward, write a note on the back of it, and reblog it yourself. It’s a bit cutesie, but, in an era where post-Disney tweens are twerking their way to stardom, that’s okay.

We spoke to the man behind the project, filmmaker Braden King, who explained the idea behind the slideshow.

Why did you decide to make the Tumblr slide over a conventional music video?

I’ve been obsessed with Tumblr for a few years now. I was interested in where the form might be going and the different modes of storytelling. What became clear was that people were using Tumblr as a way of synthesising their life experiences the same way we do when we allow ourselves to enter into a story.Things they’re experiencing seemed to be the bleeding edge of a new kind of storytelling.

So what was the desired end result?

A big part of the goal for this was to try and create a visual music experience that was a synesthetic experience of a song. There was a desire to get past logic in the same way that music can, and tap into a kind of unconscious visual experience that mimics the way we experience a song we relate to.

How did you choose the blogs featured?

The engine is currently drawing from a list of 21 Tumblrs and a global list of tags that are pouring in from Tumblr as a whole. Some were blogs I’d been following for a long time, and seemed to fit the tone of the song and the emotions that we wanted this thing to feel like. Others were probably found through research and trial and error.

How did you approach the Tumblr fiends?

Some of them know about it and some of them don’t. There’s a passive level of contact where I know some of them are seeing an increase in their reblogs. From my perspective this is a discussion that I’m anxious to get into. I see the engine and the video as functioning as very similar to any other tumblr blog- you don’t necessarily contact someone who you’re reblogging, for example.

Can you tell which images in the slide are the most popular?

The main one is the post we started with, which is the album cover. That continues to have quite a life. Some of the animated gifs are doing well- Swing Largo is run by someone I’d consider to be an artist who makes these gorgeous animated gifs from old film footage and photographs. Most of it is original work, and that’s been quite popular.

What are your three Tumblr recommendations?

Swing Largo would be one of them. There’s a photographer called Kelsey Reckling who I’m a fan of. There’s also a woman in Connecticut who has a blog called toooth. The blog that probably got me hooked on Tumblr in the first place was probably Yimmy Yayo, a couple of years ago. In my limited experience it’s an incredibly well curated blog.

Did you have to go through 200 pages of 21 Tumblr sites to make sure everything was suitable?

My initial idea was to base it only on tags and pull from Tumblr as a whole, but I found that people will tag incredibly dissimilar images. We ended up using tags as a way of further refining images from a certain blog. If there was a strain of images we were getting from blog x that we didn’t feel was appropriate, we could reduce the probability that it was going to grab one of those images from that blog or we could eliminate that tag from that particular blog. We decided to use a bit of machine intelligence to get what we wanted.

Are you relying on these blogs to be constantly updating?

There’s a massive amount of material we’re drawing from, so a lack of updating doesn’t really hurt us that much. What Tim and I are thinking about is how this might be expanded upon. We’re considering an environment where you could stream the entire record. It’s become another creative outlet for him and for the band. I’m incredibly excited to see where this is leading. I feel like this is version 0.5.

Cool, and finally, was there any worry that the video wouldn’t get much exposure?

No, I don’t think there was. That’s not to say we were incredibly confident, everybody went into it with open eyes. We knew there was a risk that noone would ever see this. I feel like it can be a bit difficult to get excited about shooting another single channel music video at this point in history- the only space for innovation in that field is content based and we need some ever more outlandish content for these videos. It was thrilling for me to come up with something that was an entirely other way of experiencing a song that felt it was progressive. There’s no way of moving forward without the risk of total failure.

And on that deep note, I thank you for your insight Braden. Have a nice day!

Now go and watch the video for yourself at califonestitches.tumblr.com

Follow Tamara on Twitter @tamararoper

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