Metope describes his music as "seeming to long for a transformation of their digital being into flesh, and that by bit reduction they attempt to imitate life"(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metope_%28producer%29)
The Kobol album containing the song Rebird has been one of my favourite electronic releases for a couple of years now. The delayed but otherwise pretty classic suspense curve aswell as the vital, yet minimal sound catched my attention right from the start.
Inspired by oldshool side scroller and jump'n'runs computer games I felt that a two dimensional movement would reflect the character of the song pretty well.
The songs sound has something really two dimensional and driving which gets underlined by this motion aswell.
The growing complexity and layering of the music is visually described by the emerging environment, which the three abstract lifeforms travel through. Refractive elements and layers have been used to accentuate the songs dissonant parts, and to contrast/refract the initial two dimensional look with something different.
My personal goal was to capture the whole motion as if it was an actual game/level, and thus without a single cut. Colour and gamma shifts were added to intensify the musical changes, where the simpel movement might not have been enough. They also serve to underline the suspense curve.
Finally I would like to add that in my opinion musical cognition or aesthetical perception in general is something really individual. I would never claim that this is the only correct visual interpretation of the song. It's my personal interpretation and I hope it's enjoyable for others too!
The Video was built in the context of the "Clips & Clicks" seminar at Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel which deals with the music video in the 21st century. Thanks to Prof. Tom Duscher, Sven Lütken and all the others giving me feedback!
Technical things:
My personal goal was to program the whole video myself, but instead of ending up with some sort of visualizer I decided to add a "storyline" which should reflect the characteristics of the song. I used c++(www.openFrameworks.cc) together with openGL and many GLSL shaders to achieve the look of the video. The video is not optimized for realtime use but still almost always runs at 30fps.
I experimented with raycasted isosurfaces alot in the past month. A few iterations can be seen here:vimeo.com/9597005 here vimeo.com/10271624 and vimeo.com/11447967.
When the video idea slowly came along I immediately felt that they could maybe help me out in the process of making things more organic.
The biggest advantage of writing your own software as a designer/artist is that you are not bound to the capabilities of software but rather can create anything you have in mind (even though todays creative software is really powerful and great without any doubt). Furthermore I feel like you don't fall into software specific aesthetical patterns as much. (for instance you can often times tell that a video was created using Aftereffects)
Another very big plus is that you can easily reuse the code for live visuals, since it almost runs realtime anyways!
Unfortunately vimeo added some slight artifacts.
Thanks again to Metope of Areal Records for letting me use the song!
areal-records.com/
The Kobol album containing the song Rebird has been one of my favourite electronic releases for a couple of years now. The delayed but otherwise pretty classic suspense curve aswell as the vital, yet minimal sound catched my attention right from the start.
Inspired by oldshool side scroller and jump'n'runs computer games I felt that a two dimensional movement would reflect the character of the song pretty well.
The songs sound has something really two dimensional and driving which gets underlined by this motion aswell.
The growing complexity and layering of the music is visually described by the emerging environment, which the three abstract lifeforms travel through. Refractive elements and layers have been used to accentuate the songs dissonant parts, and to contrast/refract the initial two dimensional look with something different.
My personal goal was to capture the whole motion as if it was an actual game/level, and thus without a single cut. Colour and gamma shifts were added to intensify the musical changes, where the simpel movement might not have been enough. They also serve to underline the suspense curve.
Finally I would like to add that in my opinion musical cognition or aesthetical perception in general is something really individual. I would never claim that this is the only correct visual interpretation of the song. It's my personal interpretation and I hope it's enjoyable for others too!
The Video was built in the context of the "Clips & Clicks" seminar at Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel which deals with the music video in the 21st century. Thanks to Prof. Tom Duscher, Sven Lütken and all the others giving me feedback!
Technical things:
My personal goal was to program the whole video myself, but instead of ending up with some sort of visualizer I decided to add a "storyline" which should reflect the characteristics of the song. I used c++(www.openFrameworks.cc) together with openGL and many GLSL shaders to achieve the look of the video. The video is not optimized for realtime use but still almost always runs at 30fps.
I experimented with raycasted isosurfaces alot in the past month. A few iterations can be seen here:vimeo.com/9597005 here vimeo.com/10271624 and vimeo.com/11447967.
When the video idea slowly came along I immediately felt that they could maybe help me out in the process of making things more organic.
The biggest advantage of writing your own software as a designer/artist is that you are not bound to the capabilities of software but rather can create anything you have in mind (even though todays creative software is really powerful and great without any doubt). Furthermore I feel like you don't fall into software specific aesthetical patterns as much. (for instance you can often times tell that a video was created using Aftereffects)
Another very big plus is that you can easily reuse the code for live visuals, since it almost runs realtime anyways!
Unfortunately vimeo added some slight artifacts.
Thanks again to Metope of Areal Records for letting me use the song!
areal-records.com/