by Matthew Cobb
Have you ever had that dream (or trip) where you’re watching TV, and every channel you flip through – the shopping channel, the bad made-for-TV movie channel, the History channel, etc – has people singing Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’? Me neither. But the makers of this astonishing artefact clearly did, as that’s exactly what happens. I can’t embed the thing on the page, so you’ll just have to click on the link below, wait a few seconds for the thing to load, and then flick through the channels. During that fantastic churning Hammond organ opening sequence, the programme shows you the various options, then you’re on your own. They’re all great, but the guy on Channel 121 is pretty poor, I thought.
Click here: http://video.bobdylan.com/desktop.html
As the science writer Adam Rutherford tw**ted:
There's really no point in doing anything else now. Ever. Well done everybody.http://t.co/qpVOhPT0wg
— Dr Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford) November 19, 2013
holy fuck, man…trippy!
That’s fantastic. And so cool. A hell of a lot of work must have gone into syncing all the images with the sound. I can’t imagine how the creator of this managed to find bits of track that matched so precisely.
(And I can say from experience in matching occasional videos that have gone out of sync, the sound and picture have to match within about 0.2 seconds max, any more than that and the video starts to look ‘wrong’).
Impressive!
It isn’t random bits of video–it’s all custom filmed to go with the song. A few of the “channels” use actual current tv shows (eg. The Price is Right, Pawn Stars), and the rest are parodys of typical TV content.
I notice the flash version is different than the iOS version. Flash is fully interactive allowing one to flip channels at will, while the iOS version gives you a few choices every 15 seconds or so. The iOS version is really pretty awful.
Amazing. I think the history and the shopping channels are the best. And the weather woman on the BCC chan. And the cooking show. What software does this? We can never trust videos again.
So you’re saying this is actors singing along with the soundtrack? I’m so disappointed. Like, it’s still clever and witty, but the awesome technical geekery which I had attributed to the makers is absent.
Can’t win ’em all. 🙁
Yeah, i’m also feeling let down to find it’s just simple lip-syncing. I read an article on another site where they were talking with the property brothers guys about how they were excited to take part in the whole thing.
That floating cat is really freaky. Are all kids’ programmes made by acid heads?
That was a weird experience. Especially before coffee.
Book recommendation: Like a Rolling Stone by Greil Marcus. There probably aren’t a whole lot of songs about which a whole book has been written, but this is one of them. Very interesting read.
Never read the book, but I’ll just say that Dylan would be a legend if he’d written nothing else. Sometimes “genius” doesn’t do the concept justice.
Most righteous and excellent!
Far out.
TFB!!