Music Visualizer

Hey all. For my name animation, I'm working with audio quite a bit. One of the elements of my piece is EQ bars that are set to the bass, mid and treble frequencies in the track I'm working with. So, I thought I'd explore some other examples of music visualizers that used expressions similarly to the methods we learned in class. This one is really intricate and visually breathtaking, while at the same time you can still understand HOW it was made. The artist is Matthias Müller. He used 3ds max, After Effects, Krakatoa and fumefx.

Bonobo Music Video

I’m into all different types of music, but recently I’ve been getting into trip hop and other electronic types of music. I recently came across a music video for this song “Cirrus” by Bonobo and the music video blew me away. This music video takes old clips from old 1950 films and creates a collage of moving images. Although it starts off pretty normal it takes a huge turn fast and the creator layers all the original clips we saw on top of each other. One thing that I really like about this video is the clips move to the beat of the song. It makes the clips flow really well and not look as random. It’s also really interesting they were able to pan on the images, it created a cool effect. Creating music videos like these are something I’m extremely interested in, I hope I can get editing skills like these someday.  I think we began to sort of work on something like this, with moving the square to the bass/treble of the song. Although this video has kind of a creepy/eery feeling it’s definitely fun to watch and plays with your head. 

Awesome Music Video

One of my favorite artists, Flying Lotus, just released his new album "Until The Quiet Comes." His music is a blend of hip-hop and electronic, with insane pulsating beats. Most of his tracks are instrumental with amazing energy just flowing out of them. He released a new music video which is all animated. Check it out.

It looks like After Effects was used in creating this video! I'm not a huge fan of performance based music videos and definitely enjoy videos made based off just the music. The video is pretty weird, but I think the visual style is so unique. Everything moves to the beat of the video. Watch the legs of the robots and how they walk. It's pretty cool to know that our class knows how to achieve this. I would really enjoy creating an animated music video just because you could do anything!

V Squared Labs

      One of the things I am most passionate about in my life is electronic dance music (EDM).  Ever since I was little I have loved its particular sound.  Nearly two years ago I began DJing as a hobby and as a way to make money on the side.  Recently I have acquired a copy of Ableton and now I am learning how to produce this genre of music.  It would be a dream career for me to be a DJ and producer who gets to travel around the world and spin for masses of people.

      Since taking this class, I have discovered a new interest of mine.  Most of the EDM events feature some sort of lighting and visual effects.  In my opinion, poor visuals will break a DJs performance while decent to superb visuals will only serve to make their set better.  I personally think a really fun and exciting career would be to work for a company that has to design all of these background visuals.  One company I find to be top notch and would be fantastic to work for is V Squared Labs.

     V Squared Labs assembles both the visuals and the actual structures on stage.  They work with many of the best artists in not just EDM but in all of today's biggest music genres.  Here's an example of their work below.



V Squared Labs Reel from V Squared Labs Inc. on Vimeo.

      Of all of the set designs they show in that video I find Amon Tobin's ISAM the most incredible.  I wonder how long it takes to produce all of these things!  I would not be surprised if it took much longer to make the actual visual than it does to build the on-stage construct.