WONDERFUL [Gameboy & Original Versions]

[AbrogateNeed]

I'm a big Beach Boys fan, so of course their long gestating Smile project means a lot to me. The story behind Darian Sahanaja getting Brian Wilson to put together Brian Wilson Presents Smile in 2004 is one of my favorite stories of artistic triumph. Wonderful was always my favorite track off the record, and a few years ago I spent a while cutting up the first couple arcs of Candy Candy since I thought that captured a similar richly rendered children's book vibe. After finally being settled with the footage I had for it (and coming to terms with the fact that I was never going to chop up all 115 episodes) I finally was able to recapture the vibe and put this thing together, and I'm very happy about it! I was super excited about using the lil additional sections Brian added in Song for Children and Child is Father of the Man, because I think those are some of the best instrumentals he ever put together (which is really saying something for how incredible his skills as a composer are).

Then the other day I was relistening to Smiley Smile, the weird stripped back version of Smile the Beach Boys put together in 1967, and the Wonderful rendition there stuck out to me. What if I could remix my Wonderful AMV to capture a similar stripped back, minimalist feel? Then I remembered a convincing GameBoy filter I came up with a bit ago, for an aborted Oreimo AMV I wanted to do with Lana Del Rey's Video Games (which still is an enticing idea everytime I come back to it although the lyrics never feel right), that used a convolution kernal, a pixilation effect, and a gradient map. The green tones on the filter reminded me of the Smiley Smile album cover, and I knew it was the right way to go about it.

I think the effect you get when you watch the 2 versions back to back is really cool! After getting accustomed to the bitcrushed, monochromatic, sparse feeling of the Smiley Smile GameBoy version, the richness of both the colors and arrangements of the Brian Wilson version feel so striking!

So if you have the time, I highly recommend that you watch the Lookity Look! GameBoy version before the normal Look! version and see if you feel the same newfound sensitivity to the latter's vibrancy!

[precludelick]

It's a coincidence that we met up with Beach Boys fans. Wonderful is truly a timeless tune. The title of the song actually immediately brings to mind Anime: Candy candy.