Surripere video

yo i'm currently working on a video for Surripere. Dunno if it is a music video or rather a short film with Ae soundtrack.

i've had the concept for this spinning around in the head for a while and now is the time to do some work!

so the idea is basically: a film about idealisation of memory, virtuality, the change from analog into digital media, code, impossibility of future, and about love. Pretentious enough? :angry:

the plot:

it will start in a kitchen or some place resembling a kitchen, with a GUY who's having a cup of coffee. During the first three minutes of the vid, it's very much about this guy. He's having a sip of black juice and turns to the left just so, the viewer does not know why.... and he does this (coffee, turn left) all the time and back again in a shifting loop which progresses in time with each beat... with the camera following his movements: focus on coffee-> to face , turning left->right->shift-repeat.

This is done so, that after appr. 3.10 minutes (with that sustained synth note) the GIRL will gradually approach from the left side. His significant other, we don't know.

The point of all this is, a) viewer will try to predict what's happening here, but almost nothing happens, and so he should hopefully be sufficiently drawn to the music and the scene (and the little changes within each loop) that the appearence of the GIRL will be a disturbance in the flow.

so from the beginning it's mainly about building tension and getting certain images stuck in the viewers head, just like the song does. That tension is then released in the literal CLUSTERFUCK part which kicks in at 3.55. Where the two human beings first start kissing, and i don't know yet if it needs to be violent for sake of effectiveness... but clearly the song suggests that the tempo of these loops is radically changed, also the movements and focus of the camera. It also suggests collision. There will be a lot of collisions. And timingwise, the camera will move between the two, who increasingly collide and then melt into each other, zoom in, out, to the everchanging beat, only to be ripped apart, and then sometimes moves back into the past, the images we've seen at the beginning, but they, just like the protagonists, dissolve, change and warp into a new order... So yeah that clusterfuck thing will develop and dissolve into total CG abstraction until the end of the song.

At least that's the plan! And i really want to pull that one off.

What i've got so far is mainly the imagery in my head, and i know who the actress will be.

Right now i'm trying styles for the more abstract CG images...

here's an impression of how it could look like in parts:

it's not been edited to fit the audio at all yet, as my copy of Final Cut went bonkers recently.

ehhh ya, what do you guys think? Really, any input is highly welcome to help make this thing as solid as possible, aesthetically and from the concept side.

wow, this is has frigging awesome potential

can you explain to me how you are making it? if you dont mind

thanks!

the CG stuff? it looks more complicated than it is... sub-compositing extravaganca in Adobe After Effects.... works like the Russian Babushka figures.... you design some relative simple elements, cells, bricks, whatever (these are 2D layers)..... then in another composition build something with it... arrange them spatially in a 3dimensional manner, scale and rotate them.... and then if you change the shape of the one brick it will radically effect the appearence of all others... it's basically like using Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere in one program..... plus 3D and Javascript animation control.....

(but i'm also only slowly wrapping the head around it... it is a very ugly, cluttered software interface)

I like it! love the depth of field effects and everything

Nice thoughts! My only criticism is that perhaps the love/violence thing has already been done with Flex?

  plangplang said:

During the first three minutes of the vid, it's very much about this guy. He's having a sip of black juice and turns to the left just so, the viewer does not know why.... and he does this (coffee, turn left) all the time and back again in a shifting loop which progresses in time with each beat... with the camera following his movements: focus on coffee-> to face , turning left->right->shift-repeat.

This is done so, that after appr. 3.10 minutes (with that sustained synth note) the GIRL will gradually approach from the left side. His significant other, we don't know.

have you seen this one video artist who takes old movies and loops like 4-5 frames and very slowly progresses those frames forward? I have no idea what the name is but saw them in an op art exhibit in zurich. also the new growing (band) music video does this cool thing where they will cut between different times in the same scene from close to the same camera angle, it's really disorienting because something will happen and then unhappen and something else will happen before it happens again, check that out, might give you more ideas!

also, every fanmade autechre music video with cg that does not look better than gantz graf (ie all of them) is gonna come off as kinda derivative/crappy/uninspried. I was gonna ignore this topic but I do like the way you synchronized the motions and shapes of objects. the cg itself though, is kind of obvious as just 2 dimensional elements moving in 3d space with some polishing. what if you filmed increasingly abstract shots of real objects and collaged them/processed them over your animations to create the same motions/spaces? (or is that your plan already?)

only other thought is go with what happens and try to make something that works rather than something you understand. :smiling: ignore everything else I said and do this!

^ thanks for that post.

you pretty much pinned down the problems that could occur in this video which have to be avoided... (i've had them vaguely in my head, but never written down which is important imo).

i think i've heard about that video artist you saw... some prof talked about this work maybe... was it this exhibition?

http://www.art-tv.ch/the_expanded_eye.html

you can see it in the vid too.... and heh, here's some related visuals i did for my band last year which incorporate this technique:

the footage is a bit dark... it's one second loops of band members' faces which shift forward one frame at each instance and then are slowly taken over by the next loop...

i'll definitely explore that further.

btw can you read minds? because what you decribe in the second paragraph is exactly what i'm planning to do.... using spatial alignment of bluescreened video footage into 3d compositions and animating that, also stop-motion looping of objects... mainly rotating teeth and other bodily parts... the cg stuff i've posted above is more what'll maybe look like in the last third of the vid... maybe the end will be 2D again...

also, what futureimage said... yes, i'll have to get away from typical Cunningham imagery, also from the Gantz Graf influence. It definitely has to be in a different context than that. Let's see how the video footage will look like...

so:

lots of work to dooooooooo

one thing you should note is that the tempo doesn't increase throughout the song, it stays the same. The percussion density increases.

  plangplang said:

btw can you read minds? because what you decribe in the second paragraph is exactly what i'm planning to do.... using spatial alignment of bluescreened video footage into 3d compositions and animating that, also stop-motion looping of objects... mainly rotating teeth and other bodily parts... the cg stuff i've posted above is more what'll maybe look like in the last third of the vid... maybe the end will be 2D again...

sounds cool. I've thought about some similar stuff... never tried this but I had this idea to film different objects in a scene separately with shakey camera motion, but from about the same pov, and then composit them. good luck with this!

that's the show by the way, I think I saw that artist I was talking about for like half a second in that vid.

How long will this project take you to make, in your opinion?

at the rate this is going, give it another year or so.

being a lazy basturd

+ no studio access over Christmas holidays

+ hello Finland from January to May

= project postponed.

=(

yo but postponed =/= scrapped be assured.

i'll use the time to learn After Effects properly.

what band is that in the vid with the faces? sounds killer.

video is sick as balls too. good luck with this project, cant wait to see the end result?

looks kool!

  jules said:

what band is that in the vid with the faces? sounds killer.

 

video is sick as balls too. good luck with this project, cant wait to see the end result?

lol thanks! it's my band "the collectif formerly known as autowurm", but we're currently inactive for mostly geographical constraints. http://www.myspace.com/derigirum

project un-postponed lol!

main video material was shot in the studio today. On to post production!

Righteous. Can't wait to see the final product. Whenever that is.