SID’s 1st Oz

baker b.’s personal synch journey through the golden age of synching, part vi of vi (we’re done!)

I wanted to go ahead and finish the series off this morning if possible. I’m sorry to disappoint some of you but I’ve decided not to post a link to the video files this go around. I can send them to you individually through messaging if you wish. I watched most of SID’s 1st Oz yesterday while the wife was in class, but fell asleep before reaching the end. I was still impressed by the power of the first half, however. It’s just that I had a full stomach and also was drinking some wine. You know how that goes.

A little bit of background. I served as administrator for a co-op forum called The Film/Album Synchronicity Board from about June 2000 until Sep 2002. I remember the last month especially because it was when my father died. An end in more ways than one. Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000 and Horton Hears The Who lie on the near side of this end, while The Point of The Wall and SID’s 1st Oz came after it, or Nov. and Dec. 2002 approximately. In looking at SID yesterday and seeing Dorothy re-enter Oz after crossing the Deadly Desert again to the accompaniment of Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play album, I was reminded what this synch might be most about, and that’s the subject of death. Namely Oz = death, The End. Or, more specifically, the afterlife.

I don’t have a SID’s 1st Oz website to fall back on in this case, unfortunately. I’ll have to describe it as briefly as possible. We’re dealing with 26 base tiles here, or almost 3x the amount of what I’d used in any synch up to this point. Four artists are employed: Jethro Tull, Queen, Roger Waters (1st solo album; with Ron Geesin) and Syd Barrett (1st solo album as well, plus 3 of his Pink Floyd tracks). The works of these artists are not isolated in big blocks this time, like Walt SIDney’s F2K, but are woven into each other to create a larger whole. And like with Pink Vertigo, Horton Hears The Who and The Point of The Wall, an overall storyline is highlighted. Aiding this cause are numerous bleedthroughs of dialog from the Return to Oz movie, many more than what appeared in MessiaenSphere. I’d say there might be close to 50 of these without an actual count.

Center is strongly emphasized, carrying forth or transposing the strong center of the Passion Play album (the enigmatic Hare Who Lost His Spectacles tale). That’s different as well. And unlike Horton Hears The Who and The Point of The Wall, I didn’t just pick and choose tracks to match the video. They are inserted into the synch in almost the same chronological order that they are found on the albums. 1 artist is bonded to 1 album in this manner (except for Barrett and the early Pink Floyd stuff). SID’s 1st Oz is also divided into 4 “regions”, each with similar qualities. It’s a difficult synch to describe without illustrations. I’ll direct the more curious here until further notice:

http://www.appstate.edu/~brittanma/paradox/paradox15.html

I was also speculating this morning about “what ifs”. What if I decided to keep The Film/Album Sync Board going and attempted to push the envelope and raise audiovisual synching to a higher ground. Perhaps a more polished, more accessible SID’s 1st Oz could have helped some. If we hadn’t been beaten down by copyright issues… But I decided it all had to be let go of. And I believe a part of me died there as well. Slowly but steadily, you recover and move on. That’s another series altogether, probably for a different arena.

So let’s just see what happens next, shall we? 🙂

Thanks a bunch,
baker b.