When one of my previous girlfriends broke up with me I wanted to do this with a picture of her on the beach. Now that my current girlfriend is breaking up with me I found finally I have a chance to do this. This song is so brilliant in its lyrics and its simplicity of the music. It's pure poetry. I hope I didn't ruin it by imposing my personal image of a girlfriend disappearing from my life upon it. In case I did, I apologize.

This is on my iPhone and I watch it once in a while. It's a consolation for me. And I thought you might appreciate it too. I just love the way you still see E. walking at the end of the video clip even though she isn't there anymore. And it takes a while until you see the finishing picture for what it really is: the empty road ahead without anyone in it.

Some technical details about making this: it took me about two hours. Half an hour was spent using the stamp tool in Photoshop (but I'm sure gimp.app would have done a good job too) to make the image of the empty road. Then I tried just creating a transition effect between the original image and the manipulated one in iMovie but apparently transition effects cannot be set to 2'34", the time this song lasts. So I was stuck there, until I thought of Quartz Composer. That allowed me to do some small programming tweaks to an example I found in my Developer folder and create the movie as I wanted it. I exported it as a Quicktime movie to put it into iMovie to get the music on, but iMovie didn't quite handle the Quicktime very well. I ended up having to convert the movie into mp4 using iSquint to have a movie that could be handled by iMovie. From there on, it was just pressing a couple of buttons to export it to Youtube.

This just to say that although iMovie can be useful, it has its limitations that are just unforgivable. You are not supposed to end up with error -2009 trying to export to Quicktime. You are not supposed to end up with 2'34" is too big a value for transition effects and then no clue as to why this is or as to what the biggest value is. It's a good program. But far from perfect.

The low quality of the movie is probably due to too many conversions from source image to final movie. I would need a better tool than iMovie to do it pixel perfect, but then again I kind of like the shaking of the pixels as a minimalistic animation effect like in Dr. Katz .

Well, hope you enjoy it.