“You just make use of the things you find around you. “Searching for a good synch is no different than any other creative activity,” he says. Inspired equally by collage art and the cut-up technique of William Burroughs, Johnston experimented. Johnston got hooked after a buddy showed him a micro-synch of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey with Pink Floyd’s “Echoes.” “If you do the synch right,” he says, “there’s a moment in the Star Gate sequence, in the more abstract section, where everything looks almost computer graphical, and there’s a spiraling of color that happens right on a transition in the song. That message board was so active that it actually filled up my internet account at the time and crashed my ISP.” “The site was going nuts and I was struggling to keep up with all of the things people were sending me. At its peak, in the early 2000s, the Arkive “brought a lot of people together,” Johnston says. Michael Johnston is the former proprietor of Synchronicity Arkive. Take second-rate Neo and add the Mars Volta’s belovedly thorny debut and, apparently, you get “The Matrix: Re-Loaded In The Comatorium.” Others were so overwrought that they have to be sincere, and are all the more glorious for it. Staind’s Break The Cycle pairs with Ashton Kutcher’s time-warper The Butterfly Effect? Julie Taymor’s experimental Shakespeare reinvention Titus goes quite nicely with the soundtrack to The Wedding Singer? Dark Side Of The Moon actually synchs perfectly with Paul Blart: Mall Cop, too? Some claims were people happily taking the piss. They experimented, then shared their best results: Radiohead’s OK Computer was paired with Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (as “12 Computers”) and with The Return Of The Jedi (as “OK Jedi.”) The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots was synched with Terminator 2: Judgment Day to become “Yoshimi Battles The Terminator Too.”
#Pink floyd wizard of oz plus
Naturally, they were attracted to sci-fi and fantasy, plus any kind of complicated popular music. You will perhaps not be surprised to hear that the synchers were mostly young men, mostly of a geekier persuasion. Who were these people? What was it that they were looking for in the synchedelia? They went out and they created their own.
#Pink floyd wizard of oz movie
On eyesore message boards and lovingly handmade websites like Synchronicity Arkive and /musicals/cinesynchs, word of mouth again took over, and a community blossomed to traffick and trade in movie synchs. In the late-early days of the internet, the late ’90s into the early 2000s, the concept of the movie synch mutated forward. “Dark Side Of The Rainbow,” as it’s now widely termed, became totemic. As Savage wrote, “Several calls and a faxed request to a Pink Floyd publicist at Columbia Records were unanswered.” Far from cutting the synch’s lore off at the pass, though, the band’s rejection of the strange creation only gifted it an air of intrigue. (“The line ‘no one told you when to run’ from ‘Time’ is sung just as the scene switches to Dorothy running away from home to save Toto.”) It also helped establish the band’s disavowal of knowledge of the whole thing. The short piece delineated the synch’s peculiar moments of matched-transitions and of song lyrics describing actions. It was a humble moment, with reverberations. One day, on the Usenet board -floyd, he came across a loose description of the synch as he recalls, it was just someone “saying vaguely they had heard about it from some people in Los Angeles.” He tried it himself, on his dorm-mate’s tiny television, then pitched it to the editor for the Gazette’s then extant “Gen-X oriented” features page, “next.” Charlie Savage is now a national-security reporter for the New York Times specializing, as he puts it, in “surveillance, torture, indefinite detention and the like.” In the mid-’90s, though, he was a Pink Floyd obsessive and a college intern at the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. But we do know who first brought it to the attention of the mainstream. We don’t know why on earth they thought to do so. We don’t know who thought to try it first. It’s just, like, a thing people know: If you play Pink Floyd’s 1973 album Dark Side Of The Moon at the same time as 1939’s The Wizard Of Oz (and mix in possibly a few cold beers and perhaps a small dosage of your light drug of choice) then the music and the visuals – well, they synch. The greatest movie synch in history is a truism passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. Like all true folklore, the greatest movie synch in history doesn’t have a point of origin.