ABOUT TIME!

It has been a long journey for this DVD to be released! This video was made in 1981 and then forgotten for 20 years. In 2000 Klaus Flaming and I started the search for one of the 2 original masters we knew existed... But after two years we had not found a single copy of the Motorbirds Video! It looked like we had lost it completely.

One year later we managed to find (maybe?) the only existing copy of it. Then followed 4 years of relentless work that kept me busy and away from this project. But now it’s finally here!

Originally Moottorilinnut (Motorbirds) came out under Kimmo Kuusniemi Band. It almost came out as KGB (Kimmo Guusniemi Band) and of course it should have come out as Sarcofagus as the band still had three original players (Kimmo Kuusniemi, Juha Kiminki and Esa Kotilainen).

It was supposed to have another cover but as the cover artist was “soon to be my ex-wife” I could not say: “That’s a bloody awful cover!” The alternative cover was used in the original album in the leaflet and also on the back.

THE NEW COVER

We wanted to stick to the original style but separate the DVD from the Motorbirds CD. So, now we have BOTH of the covers and we’ll leave it to you -the audience- to decide which one you want to use!

Also I went through the raw footage tapes that suddenly surfaced last year to get new pictures for the booklet. The back cover is from the 2004 Online Edition.

THE VIDEO

The video is in ORIGINAL FORM. It has all the mini stories tying the songs together. At the end it has the TV COMMERCIAL of the album. This is a truly Monty Python style TV Commercial :)  The Soundtrack is from the 2004 Digital Master.

BRIEF HISTORY OF MOTORBIRDS VIDEO  (Full Story at www.sarcofagus.com/video.htm )

Motorbirds Video was made in 1981. Back then we didn’t have video rentals or video sales, most people didn’t even have a VCR or a Colour TV.

The Net was a fishing term, Mobile Phone was two tin cans and a string, Computer was a pocket calculator... How did we survive?

Motorbirds was definitely the first Finnish full album length sales video ever. Probably the first in Scandinavia. I’m not even sure if there were any other

similar Heavy Videos Internationally out back then (Judas Priest Live video came out in 1983). So we were the true pioneers of the music video age.

In 70s and early 80s the music videos were prominently made by Television Companies for their (very few) music programmes. They usually had just

the band playing and a few dance girls. Also there were few Music Feature Films like Led Zeppelin: “Song Remains The Same”. Story based videos

were just starting to appear. Motorbirds has a “story” connecting all the songs together and songs have images supporting the lyrics.

It was radical and innovative in those days :)

The problem was that the video I was planning would have cost more than £500 000, in today’s currency.

So there I was, the first time Producer/Director, without any experience in video, putting together a very ambitious full album length story based music

video project, without any money!

I got in talks with Helsinki Cable Television (HTV). I’ve always been able to get people excited about projects. HTV had two young guys; Jari Mynttinen (editor) and Harri Väätäinen (camera) who wanted to experiment with the limits of the (then) new video technology. Their boss was one of the very few people who could see the bigger picture and made this video possible.

Thank You to everyone who took part in this project!

I hope you enjoy watching this as much as we enjoyed making it in 1981! 

Kimmo Kuusniemi, UK, 2008