Old Movie Stars Dance to Uptown Funk

[WantDisclosure]

An old-timer like me can appreciate something like this!

YouTuber is "Nerd Fest UK."

Published on Oct 6, 2015

My inspiration came from What's the Mashup? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmnSm...) but I didn't manage 100! The idea was to do the same for movies from the Golden Age – meaning no title later than 1953 (although there is one at the end.) Oh, and none of these clips was sped up or slowed down.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1F0lBnsnkE

To see the movie titles and dates, turn closed captions on.

Actually, most of the movies were made before I was born. (I'm old but I'm not that old!)

[WantDisclosure]

I'm amazed at how well the audio matches up to the moves in the clips.

I'm wondering whether that is done with software.

[Dreamtimer]

The human brain plays a big part in that. It will match up the rhythms and sounds into coherence. Even with a speech played over a song this effect will happen and you'll think the song was written for it. As long as the two things are close enough.

[enjoy being]

Good fun.

I put it down to things alongside the golden ratio and such. Harmonic templates in organisms, fractals, Fibonacci sequence...
All these things are scales and ratios related to the building blocks of the universe. Within it there are some which are more, in the key of, or like base number systems, base Earth or to the key of Earth. Though variations on that could be debated a bit...

But we have this scale of proportions and notions of symmetry and harmony. Being we are of the same scale of numerical construction, we resonate with harmonies of that scale. We recognise these harmonies as beauty. In another 'world' where the ratios might be different numbers, then theoretically they may have a different notion of beauty.
But here on earth, we are stuck in a ratio set almost. We create things which we think are original and things which we resonate with, but really we are perhaps just tuning things into the native harmonic ratios. Therefore, when someone dances to music 50+ years ago, chances are they are still dancing to the same heartbeat of scale and the ability to splice new music over top is in fact not as surprising as one might have thought.

[Aragorn]

Good fun.

I put it down to things alongside the golden ratio and such. Harmonic templates in organisms, fractals, Fibonacci sequence...
All these things are scales and ratios related to the building blocks of the universe. Within it there are some which are more, in the key of, or like base number systems, base Earth or to the key of Earth. Though variations on that could be debated a bit...

But we have this scale of proportions and notions of symmetry and harmony. Being we are of the same scale of numerical construction, we resonate with harmonies of that scale. We recognise these harmonies as beauty. In another 'world' where the ratios might be different numbers, then theoretically they may have a different notion of beauty.
But here on earth, we are stuck in a ratio set almost. We create things which we think are original and things which we resonate with, but really we are perhaps just tuning things into the native harmonic ratios. Therefore, when someone dances to music 50+ years ago, chances are they are still dancing to the same heartbeat of scale and the ability to splice new music over top is in fact not as surprising as one might have thought.

Many indigenous cultures use odd-meter rhythms, and those may feel a bit awkward to us westerners — unless you're a musician and/or you're familiar with jazz (insofar as there would be a difference between those two requisites ) — but even odd-meter rhythms can feel natural. For instance, I myself am a musician, and I've discovered that I can intuitively grok odd-meter rhythms — e.g. 5/4 or 6/4 — even though my left brain hemisphere cannot immediately identify the exact rhythm without actually counting the quarter-note beats.

The song here-below is structured around multiple different odd-meter rhythms and yet I can perfectly "dig" this song.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv1KXIeJ8h8

[WantDisclosure]

The human brain plays a big part in that. It will match up the rhythms and sounds into coherence. Even with a speech played over a song this effect will happen and you'll think the song was written for it. As long as the two things are close enough.

But don't you think it must have been very time-consuming to locate the moments in the clips that would be close enough to the rhythms in the audio?

Or do you think the YouTuber just randomly put together the clips?

[enjoy being]

It was indeed well done KT. But that's what I mean, the beats and expressions are going to be closer than one might think, although a bit of work went into editing that one well. Maybe the person who edited it paid attention to the time tempo of the music the actors are dancing to and worked it from there, but still it would have taken a while.
What's the bet the idea came from having the tv on silent and some music playing and it was noticed how some songs went well.
Oh and it looks like Laurel and Hardy dance better to Aragorn's song.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoXa2Pl7Hk0

[Aragorn]

But don't you think it must have been very time-consuming to locate the moments in the clips that would be close enough to the rhythms in the audio?

Or do you think the YouTuber just randomly put together the clips?

Personally, I think he selected the clips to match the song. Both the music and the video footage have been digitized, so it's (relatively) easy to match them using a good video editing tool. It's not perfect, though. There are some fragments where the dance move is either just ahead or just behind the beat, or not entirely in the same rhythm. But one really has to pay attention to notice it. So in overall, it's still a nice effort.

I've done some mild video editing myself — nothing like this, though — so I'm going to include a screenshot below of what that looks like. As you will be able to ascertain, there are multiple video and audio tracks — more can be added as needed — and one can insert clips and move them around on a timeline by way of drag & drop. One can also zoom in on the timeline so as to get greater precision, and one can insert markers in the different tracks so as to align them.

[WantDisclosure]

As you will be able to ascertain, there are multiple video and audio tracks — more can be added as needed — and one can insert clips and move them around on a timeline by way of drag & drop. One can also zoom in on the timeline so as to get greater precision, and one can insert markers in the different tracks so as to align them.

That is very cool!

I can see that families could have a great time doing this with their home videos.

[Aragorn]

As you will be able to ascertain, there are multiple video and audio tracks — more can be added as needed — and one can insert clips and move them around on a timeline by way of drag & drop. One can also zoom in on the timeline so as to get greater precision, and one can insert markers in the different tracks so as to align them.

That is very cool!

I can see that families could have a great time doing this with their home videos.

The software in that screenshot is Kdenlive, which runs in the KDE Plasma desktop environment — or at least, on top of the libraries thereof — on GNU/Linux and other UNIX operating systems. It is Free & Open Source Software, and as such, it is freely downloadable. It also exists in a readily installable version for Microsoft Windows — for Apple macOS, only the source code is supplied and must be compiled locally.

From what I can tell, you are running the 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows 7 on your computer. If you click this link here, it will automatically download the software to your computer as a ".7z" archive from a mirror site in Canada — that should give you a very decent download speed. ".7z" is a type of "zip" format — i.e. a compressed archive — which you can unpack with 7-Zip, which itself can be downloaded for your platform by clicking here.

The instructions for installing Kdenlive in Microsoft Windows follow below...

---

• Unzip the Kdenlive download (kdenlive-windows) using 7-Zip.

• Click here to download a ".zip" file with FFmpeg, which you'll need if you want to encode videos in the higher quality H264/265 formats instead of the lower quality WebM. Microsoft Windows should be able to unpack a regular ".zip" file these days, but 7-Zip will also be able to handle that.

• Unzip the FFmpeg download.

• Copy the content of the FFmpeg “bin” subfolder (.dll and .exe files) inside the kdenlive-windows folder.

• Copy the FFmpeg “presets” subfolder inside the kdenlive-windows folder.

• Start Kdenlive by way of the executable file kdenlive.exe from within the kdenlive-windows folder, and then close it and re-open it again.

---

Lastly, the complete manual for Kdenlive can be found by clicking here — trust me, you're going to want to read it. Enjoy!

[WantDisclosure]

Enjoy!

The person who will enjoy this is my son, who does 3D graphics and computer animation for a living. I will assign this task to him.

He also has joined TechShop for fun.

[Emil El Zapato]

Many indigenous cultures use odd-meter rhythms, and those may feel a bit awkward to us westerners — unless you're a musician and/or you're familiar with jazz (insofar as there would be a difference between those two requisites ) — but even odd-meter rhythms can feel natural. For instance, I myself am a musician, and I've discovered that I can intuitively grok odd-meter rhythms — e.g. 5/4 or 6/4 — even though my left brain hemisphere cannot immediately identify the exact rhythm without actually counting the quarter-note beats.

The song here-below is structured around multiple different odd-meter rhythms and yet I can perfectly "dig" this song.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv1KXIeJ8h8

I knew you would have to 'step' into this one. I'll bet it would be amazing to see that done with Baryshnikov...

[Emil El Zapato]

I spent several hundred dollars for some equipment that does that overlaying thing (for my daughter). She and her friends rock band needed a drummer and no one knew how to play. My daughter said she would play drums instead of her guitar so I ran out and bought her the equipment. She played it once and it is now gathering dust. My daughter quit the band because they wouldn't be serious. Oy vay!

[Aragorn]

The person who will enjoy this is my son, who does 3D graphics and computer animation for a living. I will assign this task to him.

He also has joined TechShop for fun.

In that case, be sure to tell him about Blender, which is a Free & Open Source Software 3D modeling and animation suite. You can freely download it at their website, and for different operating systems.

[WantDisclosure]

YouTuber is "Nerd Fest UK."

This video now has 38,845,712 views, according to YouTube.

Well deserved!

It's interesting to read the comments:

Nerd Fest UK
2 years ago (edited)

The clip at 1:29 showing the two guys doing the reverse back-flip, is from a movie called ‘Gold Diggers of Broadway’, one of the earliest musicals. Does it make you want to watch it all? It does me. Well you can’t…

It’s a mostly lost film. Only two reels of it survive – about twenty minutes’ worth. You can watch the footage on the DVD of ‘Gold Diggers of 1937’, which is from where I took the clip.

Isn’t that sad? It can never be re-assessed; it can never be re-discovered as a forgotten classic – no-one can ever have an opinion about it at all, really. Now you might think this was some minor picture made by a small studio – yeah, a small studio called Warner Bros! It featured an early version of Technicolor, which means that serious money was spent on it. It got good reviews and did well at the box office. If such a fate can befall a picture like this, just imagine what has happened to the less prestigious works from that time…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1F0lBnsnkE