The idea for this design came out of a late night coffee with
Dejan whilst listening to jazz.
The concept of a little seed coming up out of ground was agreed
upon and I went straight home to start designing the seedling. It
is obviously influence by Autechre’s Gantz Graf and clean
modern vector styles but visually I wanted to push the contrast
of heavy ‘harmonic distortion’ on a tiny little organic
plant. Almost as if the plants DNA was being modified by sonic pulses.
Process.
The distortion map is created in after effects using ‘audio
spectrum’ where a 16:9 map of the soundtrack was rendered
(which was to become the base of all vector movements). To create
harder and softer distortions on the plant the audio file was then
filtered so that high frequencies would be the physical distortion
on the plant and low frequencies would be the shake movement. After
the seedling was satisfactorily distorted the camera move was exported
in RLA so that the vector overlays could be matched. The overlays
were to reflect a sort of monitoring system of the amount of audio
and the plants distortions.
The audio sphere (or bass ball) is created out of the same audio
map but traced around a 3d sphere (‘alpha infection’)
and then treated in after effects to produce a glowing, pulsating
ball which is wrapped around the plant.
Doing a soundtrack for this piece was a bit of a challenge. The
coffee-table idea bounced off our heads and we both had the same,
yet different mental picture of how this animation should look like.
So it started with sound. Knowing Brad's recent influences in music
I've decided to go with the most unpleasant and distorted option
I had up my sleave Malstrom synthesizer served me well in this case.
And so I started.
First thing I had to visualise was the sound, a void would make
just before the seed comes out. For this I used a very deep bass
in Subtractor Synth. I had all sorts of ideas in my head but they
would all take a very long time to implement, especially for this
experimental piece.
Sometimes the most time consuming thing is experimentation.
It seems like no one dares to experiment anymore, I mean,
there are zillions of samples, synths and loops out there
so musicians keep recycling over and over again. I guess
every now and then an innocent error happens in the process
of sound design and that's how some of the best sounds
are created.
The idea in a form of a track bounced off couple of more times
until we've polished it to our liking. At the same time Brad was
constructing his little 3D world, and at some point it all seem
to have merged into one. In our case it was very hard to tell which
one should have been done first - sound or the animation so they
were done simultaneously. Lackieranlagen
