"Watercolour"

I've been really thinking about how much music can impact the animations you decide to create, sometimes even shaping the overarching themes in their entirety. So - here's a music video from the Australian EDM group 'Pendulum'. It uses some pretty interesting 3D animations and color effects, so I thought I'd share. You can see a planet (or... something like it) throughout the video that slowly moves around a giant lighted orb of some sort (star?), until eventually these giant rays of light that it's shooting bust the planet open. Pretty sweet stuff. And the track is awesome too.

Analyzing Motion Graphics

This past week my favorite record label, Spinnin' Records, released a preview to a new song by Alex Kenji and Leon Boiler.

What I find really fun to do now that I know more about After Effects is to watch videos and try to analyze what they did.  It looks like they put a wiggle expression on the camera to make it shake throughout.  There are also a couple of color flares thrown in here and there that are pretty easy to make in After Effects.

Something I would love to learn how to create are all the "straws" that form the portal around the :48 mark and seen throughout.  They seem to be effected by the sound of the music so their animation must be parented to the audio.  Also at 1:02 and 1:08 the rotating portals are really fun to watch but I guess they were made in Processing and not in AE.  I make that guess based on their similarities to the fractal pattern at the end of the Casino Royale opening.  But alas!  I will see what I can figure out in AE.

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.