The Mouth Project

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So, I've always liked mashups. One of my favorite examples in this "genre" is the Mouth series of albums by Neil Cicierega. For a long time I've wanted to make my own music mashups, but music creating/editing programs stress me out and I have historically burned out and gotten frustrated with them very quickly.

Not so for videos, however. Recently I saw this video on YouTube that really touched and inspired me, posted by an animator I enjoy the work of, and it got me thinking...hey, this is like a collage. A video collage. And I can make collages, and videos!

ADHD being what it is, though, I didn't really pursue this train of thought as something that I was going to do...until my girlfriend posted his video. I finally processed that I could make this kind of thing too, and make it my own, stupid way.

All that is to explain the backstory of that I've somehow gotten myself into the project of making a video collage for (hopefully) every song in the Mouth albums.

I plan on using this thread to post the videos that I make, with their "artist statements" attached, since YouTube descriptions don't feel like quite the right place to put those. I've made a few already, so I'll write about those first, then any more that I make after, hopefully until I finish the project, but who knows how long (and how many focus shifts) that will take.

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The order I make these is not the order they are in the albums, for the most part, because trying to do that would probably burn me out instantly. I just make whatever I find the most inspiration or motivation for in the moment. That said, my first video is track 14 of the first album, Melt Everyone.

I would recommend watching the videos before reading their artist statements, so I'll put the statement below in spoiler tags. I also try to keep these videos fairly tame, enough that I can post them comfortably without in-video trigger warnings, but I'll give any major possible warnings in advance in this thread.

For example, this video is centered around melting objects: primarily toys, but some chocolate bunnies too. Some of the toys catch on fire at points. The scene transitions do not flash very rapidly, but they are a quick flash to black and then the next clip.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

At first glance, this video is not particularly deep. I mean, it's called "melt everyone." Everyone is melting. That's pretty self-explanatory. And a lot of this video was based off that rather funny idea! However, this video was also made during a really rough heat wave in my area, one that was happening right at the end of August, where every day had a little "higher than historic record high" note on it in my phone's weather app. As of me writing this, it's nearing the end of September, and I'm still being given the "higher than record high" notices, wearing shorts and having to run the A/C in the Midwest USA just before the autumn equinox. That's not right. Everyone is melting, and that includes the cute little clumps of processed oil that we call toys and candy.

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The next one is significantly longer, enough that I wanted to explore two separate-but-related ideas in a single video. My first videos are actually all clustered around the same area, near the end of Mouth Sounds and the beginning of Mouth Silence. Not sure why, but it's interesting. This one is for track 16 of Mouth Sounds, Mullet With Butterfly Wings.

This video involves animals handled humanely but sometimes roughly in uncomfortable situations, in small cages, and in settings that are intended for testing on animals. Nothing graphic is shown, but there is a minor amount of blood at the beginning (a vampire bat is drinking it out of a dish) and there is a rabbit shown that is acting strangely as a result of a test (the test is not shown).

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

So, the obvious takeaway from this may at first be that I am against animal testing. But then, what does the other theme in the video imply? Am I equating laboratory testing and animal showing? The answer, in a subjective personal artist intention way, is that I am not equating anything. I'm presenting the scenes and letting their juxtaposition provoke the viewer's own thought.

As a result of wanting to present a view of animal testing that was not overt shock footage, I ended up using a lot of pro-animal-testing videos. This does not necessarily mean that I "believe" these are the conditions all lab animals are in, but it is interesting to me how we get sanitized looks at both the testing and show sides of animal husbandry: it's just that the testing is more known to be harmful when it's harmful. I don't think either are inherently "evil," but both have serious potential for suffering that needs to be carefully weighed versus the benefit to humanity.

Speaking of humanity, all the animals in this video are very closely tied to humanity by three main strings I have identified: Usefulness, Love, and Spectacle. A lab mouse is not particularly loved, nor is it made into much of a spectacle, but it is considered very useful. A pet dog may be loved, and training it to enter in a competition makes it into a spectacle, and if it wins, it may be useful. A working dog at a trial is useful, but being presented as a spectacle. I could detail this for every animal in the video, but that would take some of the fun out of it, I think.

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Okay, well, I accidentally lied about my videos all being clustered in one area. This one is the only one so far I've made based off a song from Mouth Moods, which is probably my favorite of the series, but I struggle to come up with video ideas for, for a variety of reasons. This is track 2 of Mouth Moods, titled Floor Corn.

This video has a lot of blood and (animal) violence in it. As described by my friend Andy, "exploding ketchup packets" would be the most fitting term for the characters shown in the video. The blood is only animated, and not detailed at all. The real-life portions of the footage have no blood.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

When I was a kid, I spent most of my online time on a website called Scratch. Originally a place for sharing things made with a simple kids' programming language, it quickly became a child social network, and fostered many a child fandom. I was one of the many children who read the Warriors book series and posted about it on Scratch. I didn't want to bother digging through the site itself to find the actual Warriors animations I watched as a child, so I pulled what seemed like appropriately iconic and violent ones from YouTube to stand as symbols. (My secret is I never watched any of these as a kid. The only YouTube Warriors content I liked were sad Bluestar animations and tributes to Fireheart and Graystripe's "friendship.")

As for the song itself, it's also connected to Scratch for me. Popcorn (one of the songs used in this mashup) was one of my absolute favorite songs as a kid, entirely because I heard it in a Scratch project once. Despite this video not using any Scratch footage, it's a sort of tribute to my time on the site in 2009.

Why the real life footage, you ask? Well one, for variety. And two...just look at them. This is what I imagined while reading, personally, not so much the anime cat battles. But I have genuine great respect for the kids who put their whole heart into animating Tigerstar exploding in a shower of red, and I salute them with this video.

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Now it's back to Mouth Sounds, with track 12, No Credit Card. I immediately knew what I wanted to do with this one.

This video has some bright flashing lights throughout, mainly in the very beginning (as soon as you press play). Sorry, it was the 80s.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

So...this is a weird one. I got into Transformers in 2016, right at the height of my robot obsession in my teen years. I had tentatively poked at Transformers media before, but in 2016, I read all of the More than Meets the Eye IDW comic, and it did something terrible to my brain. It's still very special to me, but that's its own story. Anyway, there's a point in the comic where some of the characters have a movie night, and they watch Back to the Future. The song remixed in this video's song features within the comic, and I grew very attached to it, even beyond its original context. So of course I wanted to feature Transformers in this video. Plus, G1 has plenty of bizarre love plots!

Something else about this song, though, is its strangely sinister atmosphere. The repetition of the "no credit card" line that lends the title to the remix always struck me as odd, and I thought it worked perfectly for Transformers, which has always been a glorified toy commercial, in all of its forms. It really came together at the end when I decided to include footage of someone's giant toy collection, which they may or may not have used a credit card to pay for.

Disclaimer: I have no opinion on the person shown in the video. It was just the biggest Transformers collection I could find a good video of quickly on YouTube. Sorry, random guy, for using you as a metaphor for consumerism, but maybe you deserved it, because holy shit this guy has a room like this for just about every 80s Boy toy line.

Oh yeah, did you know there was a Back to the Future TV cartoon, by the way? I didn't until I made this video and saw the random dog character they added has a train for some reason.

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Here's the 17th and final track from Mouth Sounds, titled Smooth Flow. Mouth Sounds has always been one of the harder ones for me to listen to on its own, but it lends itself to videos very well.

This video has some blood, but only in the context of chum in the water in a single non-graphic clip.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

Okay, this one is mostly a joke. It's not all  a joke, but mostly a joke. And isn't humor art? This video is primarily dedicated to the legendary Smooth Sharks comic and ensuing Twitter replies. It's one of my favorite stupid internet jokes ever, and I don't usually go for the "repeating a falsehood while making fun of people who try to fight with you" jokes much.

Aside from that, there's a personal touch in that Enya was the artist played for my nap times as a very young child, according to my parents. I find this song very soothing, actually. To pay tribute to that, along with real shark videos and the iconic Jaws, I included some shark media from my childhood, like Finding Nemo and the often-forgotten Discovery Kids show, Kenny the Shark. The big one featured here, though, is Shark Tale, as it's a part of my childhood of course but also a Dreamworks film, and just so happens to exist on a combo GBA cartridge with the movie Shrek. I was ecstatic at this find, as it perfectly tied in to the All Star ending of the song and album.

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Artist Statement:

Spoiler

Okay, this one is mostly a joke. It's not all  a joke, but mostly a joke. And isn't humor art? This video is primarily dedicated to the legendary Smooth Sharks comic and ensuing Twitter replies. It's one of my favorite stupid internet jokes ever, and I don't usually go for the "repeating a falsehood while making fun of people who try to fight with you" jokes much.

Aside from that, there's a personal touch in that Enya was the artist played for my nap times as a very young child, according to my parents. I find this song very soothing, actually. To pay tribute to that, along with real shark videos and the iconic Jaws, I included some shark media from my childhood, like Finding Nemo and the often-forgotten Discovery Kids show, Kenny the Shark. The big one featured here, though, is Shark Tale, as it's a part of my childhood of course but also a Dreamworks film, and just so happens to exist on a combo GBA cartridge with the movie Shrek. I was ecstatic at this find, as it perfectly tied in to the All Star ending of the song and album.

As one of the only people in the world who enjoyed Shark Tale, thank you.

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You are so welcome. I was incredibly neutral on it as a kid, but it was one of my baby cousin's favorite movies, which he would ask to watch before he could even speak simply by saying "RAAAR" (which was different than his request for Monsters Inc., which was "RAAWWRRRRR"). I watched it pretty often, but I probably have more affection for it than your average person who watched Shark Tale repeatedly at the request of a relative, so that's something, for sure.

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This one is a bit shorter and simpler than some of my other videos, but I had a very specific vision for it. It's for the first song on Mouth Silence, a truly legendary album that while making these videos, I think is my new favorite of the series. Sorry Moods, I think I just listened to it too many times as a teenager.

Anyway. There is some blood in this one, and some character's heads disappearing with skulls behind them, but it's not violent, and also it's some really ridiculous creepypasta bullshit, so it's not as scary as it sounds.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

This video is actually based on Will's OC Weatherman, a character that I love very much. He's really sad and lives in a TV. The main repeated clip in this video is from a fake creepypasta video about the kid's channel Qubo shutting down, and it became a major injoke related to Weatherman thanks to The Lounge. I really wanted to take the silly video, and take it and the feelings of the character we relate it to seriously, and made something that's relatively slow-paced and sad.

Everything changes. It's important to be aware of the danger of nostalgia, especially when using it for art. This series uses a lot of my own nostalgia, but I don't want it to be a mindless "hey, remember when things were better?" trip. There's good and bad in both old and new.

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Enough being sad. Let's be horny. The song for this one is actually the second track on Mouth Silence, titled Rollercloser.

The only thing I could really think to warn for in this one is some mild cartoon "body horror."

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

Oh boy, this one. Okay, so, I associate this song with Will. He associates it with himself. It's wacky and weird and incredibly sexual. So what better to combine all of those things with than the concept of Tumblr Sexymen? Just in case you don't know, a "sexyman" is a character that's widely considered attractive by a sizeable base of what is often female fans of a media. I won't get into the "true" definition of this term, but that's a vague idea of it. My wonderful girlfriend Will of Eggware fame happens to relate to a lot of these "sexyman" types of characters. In fact, all the characters I featured in this are ones I associate with him.

I didn't really want to make any kind of deep social commentary with this one, because frankly, I'm tired of seeing deep social commentary arguments on characters that I like. I just wanted to appreciate them. This one was for me to enjoy, and to curse my girlfriend with the burden of being known and loved.