Los Gatos resident Katherine Winkelman is a proud mother.
Her son, Gus Winkelman, is one of the co-producers of a new nine-minute music video that has almost 2 million hits on YouTube and was made with the help of Los Gatos videographers and cinematographers.
The video, released Aug. 20, had more than 300,000 views a week after it was showcased to the public.
Titled "Dream Music: Part II," it features five songs produced by local musicians from Joelistics: Days, Rabbits Running: Making Castles and Dredg; lip-synced by Los Gatos resident Beau Brigham.
According to its description on YouTube, the piece is a "musical voyage into the depths of the subconscious. This lyrical narrative reflects on the perception of time within dreams and waking life."
Mostly filmed in Northern California during six months, its producers explored a new production technique they call "lyric-lapsing," to achieve the surrealistic feeling of movement.
Katherine Winkelman said after working for more than 20 years with Los Gatos youth at the and Community Against Substance Abuse, or CASA, it was rewarding to see the success of the four producers who are extremely talented in blending art and technology.
"Dredg members were instrumental in encouraging our local live music events in Los Gatos," she said. "Los Gatos has always been home to artists of all genres."
The producers said they built on the foundation of an earlier video they named "Dream Music Part I," working for between six and eight hours to get between three and four seconds of footage.
"Our goal was to pioneer a new film genre by telling a story through art and music," they wrote. "Part 2 was made to transport the viewer from their own reality into a world of dreams and at the end, they awake to wonder how we were able to take them there. Each scene was born from the symbolic meaning of the lyrics and overall message of the film; time is the illusion within the dream of life."
Katherine Winkelman said Los Gatos residents Sean Michael Williams, Marc Donahue, Gus Winkelman, Beau Brigham worked on the project. She described them as students of state-of-the-art time-lapse photography.
"Dream Music Part I" was so well received by Ashton Kutcher, that they knew their new technique was good and ventured into creating "Dream Music Part 2," Katherine Winkelman said, adding that they took their own money to produce the video.
The video has been featured on German and Italian music TV, Katherine Winkelman said.
Williams, who had a full-time job while creating the video, said he began working on it with Donahue after the release of Part I last March. Donahue, too, was filming weddings full time as well as the other two partners. "I ended up quitting my job to just focus on this to get it done," Williams said, who owns SMWFilms.
"We have kind of pioneered this new technique and it's really catching on," Williams noted. "We took the more traditional method of time lapse and stop motion and we made it modern by putting it to music."
About the video's popularity, Williams said: "It feels great. It's very humbling. We feel very grateful that we've been able to reach the masses on that kind of scale. We're thrilled that people all over the world get to enjoy the art that we made."
Part I was made a year-and-half ago with Donahue and Williams experimenting with stop-motion techniques and putting them into music and editing the footage. "We realized we could actually do something with it."
how did I end up here with these standards I'm supposed to love? make me disappear
Thanks Marc Donahue