PPP2 - Engaging With Visualizations

Still from visualization - before the culminating point

Recently, I've been interested in creating visuals for bands to be displayed whilst performances are conducted much more than I have been in the past. Although I have made such a visual on one instance for a friend's ambient project, I wish to venture further into the realm of abstract and atmospheric visuals that grasp and envelop a band's/performer's music genre and tone. I got inspired during Leeds Light Night where I saw auditory sensitive visuals (made by Level 6 student Oscar Barany) controlled through Resolume (an interactive visual effects program) and an APC Mini (hardware device that controls music connected visuals) and will be aiming towards understanding this form of art and actively practicing it once I get the opportunity to buy the necessary equipment. However, with my initial one (one I made last year) being quite noisy and ambiguous, I aimed for this one to be much more organized and annotated to the peak amplitude of the music. Progressively, I contacted the Macedonian recently-formed band "Spectrum" (whose members I personally know) and offered to synthesize a visual for their newest teaser song, to which they agreed. Although I did not ask for monetary remuneration for this, I will for when I make a music video once they release their debut album, which is something I already discussed with them. Since they were not specific about the details of the visuals, I attempted at trying to express their tone more prominently through the visuals, for which I used an asset initially made for my Character & Narrative animation which had a dark and ambiguous demeanor. Thus, once I imported that in Premiere, along with the image they supplied me with (their current cover), I started experimenting with the myriad of effects on Premiere and thus annotated the initial flow based on the rising points of the song (where I chipped off separate frames and tinkered with their position and exposure to give it a "glitch" effect). As for the background, I reverse looped the stop-motion and changed the tint during the reversed sequence to complement the dichotomy presented by the name of the song (context, nevertheless). All in all, both I and the band consider the visuals to be highly satisfying as this paves the positive way for the further development of this technique. Moreover, I am considering spreading the word around in Macedonia (as well as here) advocating my creation of music videos and visuals.

"Spectrum - Empathy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3StQO6RaHA