The goal of that project was to illustrate a pre-recorded soundtrack. The latter being to Cool Cavemen what The Ecstasy of Gold is to Metallica: a piece that is played before each show and serve as concert intro.

It’s an original mockup of a radio broadcast, and a tribute to Classic 21 ( ex “Radio 21” ), the (best) Belgian radio station we used to listen to as teenagers, and still do.

Footage used to produce this video is public domain material found at archive.org . If you’re curious, the detailed list of all sources is available in the credits, at the end of the video.

Black and white archive frame of a man in a tweed suit and glasses reading from a script at a ribbon microphone

As for my previous project , I have to warn you that it may not look as funny as for French-speaking audience. That being said, here is the final result:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJeyu-xEL_0

The challenge of this project was to have video of people speaking in sync with the audio. I suffered a lot trying to make it as convincing as possible. If the final result is far from perfect, I find it to be believable enough for the amount of time I invested in.

As for the tools used to produce this video, I edited it in November with a development version of Kdenlive, under an Ubuntu 11.10. As usual, here is a screenshot of my timeline for reference:

Kdenlive project cutting the archive reels across five video tracks, with a vectorscope open on the left and the monitor showing passengers in an airliner cabin

The project is using Kdenlive’s “NTSC 29.97 fps” profile, which produce a 720x486 pixels stream with a pixel aspect ratio of 8/9 and a display aspect ratio of 4/3. I choose this profile as it was the closest to the original videos I downloaded from archive.org.

I composed the credits and title card in Gimp, and tried to mimic the style of that period. This mean approximative composition and abuse of typography:

GIMP building the title card over a vintage CBS microphone still, the lettering reading Cool Cavemen presents our concert intro across nine layers

To enhance the effect, I blurred everything and separated the text blocks in several layers. I then applied to each of them some random movements to add a parallax effect, thus getting closer to the look and feel produced by the imprecise optical process used in the early days of movie making.