Neal Coghlan - Kraak & Smaak feat. Bobby Nio: Plastic People

Track: Plastic People by Kraak & Smaak feat. Bobby Nio
(shortened edit for Tasty Visuals promo)
Published by Boogie Angst Music (Chrysalic Music), P&C 2008 Jalapeno Ltd.

Illustrations >> bit.ly/​TastyFlickr
Project >> nealcoghlan.co.uk/​#560347/​Tasty-Visuals
Twitter >> twitter.com/​nealcoghlan
Tasty Stickers! >> tastystickers.co.uk - available now!

These visuals all started out from a single illustration (now the animation Tasty Visuals #001, the first loop of the sequence). Whilst creating the illustration I thought about how each bit might animate and so set about turning it into a short ident type visual. It was soon after that I learnt about the Resolume competiton for Kraak & Smaak a Dutch trio of musicians who create some quality funk/breakbeat/electro tunes. As Kraak & Smaak translates to Crunchy & Tasty I thought it'd be too good an opportunity to miss to get a set of food-themed illustrations turned into VJ loops.

The original 3 loops won the competition and the prize was a commission to make 20 more loops plus a copy of the VJ software Resolume. This video shows
17 clips - the original
3 for the competition and 14 others that are built up in a similar way. The final 6 are transitions/backgrounds that can be played over the top or underneath all of these clips to give extra variation.

Before animating any of the parts I chose 3 of Kraak & Smaak's tracks and sliced it so that it was a segment of 16 beats. I then altered the tempo of the segment to 125BPM - as this works well with a 50fps frame rate (and is consequently easily scalable for slower or faster sections should I need to re-render to a certain speed). Within these segments there was enough going on musically that I could animate individual objects to sounds, meaning that you can watch them again and again and still find new bits that sync up to something. The beauty of this is that all these elements can be removed as single pieces and reassembled to create new compositions. The limitations of the grid plus no gradients or transparencies also meant that consistency between the pieces was easy and that they could all be played consecutively and gel.

My next step is to separate the elements in these visuals and use them as separate clips over multiple layer in the VJ software Resolume - allowing me to form new compositions live to music!
See pics of the process here: bit.ly/​TVResolume

nealcoghlan.co.uk
resolume.com/​
kraaksmaak.com/​

**ALSO if you like videos with additional cats: vimeo.com/​14321342