I recently bought a CD of Schmidt's Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln (The Book with Seven Seals), which is a choral work based on the book of Revelation. It didn't come with a libretto, but the recording company does provide a PDF of the libretto on its website.
I downloaded the libretto, but then I had to decide whether to print it or not. I chose not.
But I'd really like to follow the words while listening, so I hit upon a brilliant scheme to create a music video with subtitles.
Side note: I have gained a tremendous respect for the folks who do subtitles for a living!
Anyway, I've spent most of the last three days with Final Cut Express HD, aligning the words of the libretto with the music. This turned out to be a longer and more painful process than I expected. First, I placed all the music tracks on Final Cut's timeline. Then I had to listen to each number, follow along with the libretto, and put a marker on Final Cut's timeline at each point where I wanted a new subtitle to appear. This was difficult because a) I'm not extremely proficient in German, b) the singers don't always enunciate all that clearly, c) it was usually hot in my den so I had two fans blasting away, making it even more difficult to hear the words, d) the music is often composed with different choral groups singing different words at the same time, e) the published libretto doesn't always have sensible line breaks, f) since I wanted both German and English titles, it became a nuisance to reconcile the translation with the original, g) and I could go on and on...
After marking the points on the timeline where I wanted the subtitles to appear, I then dropped a text thingy onto each of those points, aligned them with each other, edited them to add the German and English words, etc.
Anyway, after all that I now have the text (mostly) aligned with the music. So I've decided to add a few images as well to try to keep something interesting happening on the screen. I'm doing this via Google searches with pretty mixed results. The trouble is that I have over an hour and a half to fill.
So if any of you know of some good graphics that illustrate key scenes from Revelation, please let me know. I'm open to anything, including comics, cartoons, serious religious artwork, you name it. I want things like the bloody lamb of god, the four horsemen, the earthquakes and storms, apocalypses, etc.
Posted by jt at August 9, 2006 02:10 PM