Turtles doing the can-can on the streets of Paris. The nocturnal beauty of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” Capital Ringers’ video team of Randy Peterson and Lee Ann Walling were conjuring and producing thirteen videos while ringers were rehearsing their “Springtime in Paris” selections.
“Making videos to complement the music of Capital Ringers is fun but challenging,” Randy says. “We need to select and integrate hundreds of photos and video clips accenting the theme of the music. Our goal is to complement, but not distract from the graceful artistry that is bell ringing. Lee Ann and I spend weeks getting this right but the end result is a sometimes beautiful, sometimes whimsical, addition to the wonderful sounds of the concert.”
For the whimsical vignettes of Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals,” Lee Ann made heavy use of Adobe’s Firefly artificial intelligence application. “Animals and skeletons cavorting around Paris would have been impossible without AI, unless we had access to a very talented artist,” Lee Ann said. “I asked for a fantasy oil painting of a lonely elephant sitting on a Paris Metro car, and la voila!”
There were limitations to the AI application. “Almost every scene conjuring Paris had an Eiffel Tower in the background — sometimes two or three!” Lee Ann said. “I started to choose scenes that were nowhere near the Eiffel Tower, like Notre Dame and Montmartre.”
The result, we hope, is an evocative visual representation of the “Springtime in Paris” selections. Beauty, bridges, the scent of blooming magnolia and cherry trees, the serenity of a swan in a park, the excitement of boat ride along the Seine. With a bateau full of turtles.
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