Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Music Project: discoloured images from children’s science journals have been collaged together by videographer Ewan Jones Morris to create this music video for London band Fanfarlo’s Cell Song (+ movie).

Fanfarlo approached Ewan Jones Morris to create the video for their latest album after seeing his previous work, and offered him the choice of which song to create the visuals.

“They were exploring a lot of sci-fi concepts with their new album,” Jones Morris told Dezeen. “I chose Cell Song as much for the subject as anything else and the story of the video grew from that.”

Imagery zooms in and out, showing sections of life forms from microscopic detail, through cellular and tissue levels up to a more familiar, human scale.

During the video, figures and objects transform into strange creatures and the singers’ faces pop-up in bubbles and on screens of vintage TVs.

The director created the animation from images of children’s science magazines from the 1960s.

“I collect a few different ‘knowledge’ magazines aimed at children, most of them printed in the 1960s – back when kids were into science, cross sections of fungus or who invented the sewing machine,” Jones Morris told Dezeen.

“There’s never a shortage of cell diagrams in biology text books,” he added.

“I used to spend hours looking through these kinds of books as a kid, and I always imagined something beyond what was actually happening in the pictures, made connections between completely different images,” said Jones Morris. “That’s what I’m recreating, that process of collaging with my brain as I scanned through those books.”

The visuals were assembled in Photoshop and each frame – 12 per second – was printed out onto paper using an “unreliable” inkjet machine.

“I try and avoid more complicated software because I want to keep everything 2D and a bit wonky,” said Jones Morris.

He tampered with the ink cartridges so the print becomes uneven, then each page was photographed slightly crumpled or wet to distort the pictures.

Cell Song features on Fanfarlo’s album Let’s Go Extinct released in February 2014.

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by Fanfarlo explores biological structures appeared first on Dezeen.

Newport producer 800xL has got a new track out called Empyreal. It’s full of pulsating synths, glitchy drums and odd snatches of echoey vocal samples.

About Dezeen Music Project | More tracks | Submit your track

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by 800xL appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Music Project: water becomes the main character in this black and white music video created by director Albert Sala for John Matthias’s Spreadsheet Blues.

Having never worked with water before, Albert Sala was interested in the different effects he could create to help evoke a sense of melancholy and tenderness he found in Matthias‘s music.

Sala was recruited by Matthias’s record label Village Green to develop the proposal for the video.

“As I listened to the first notes of the song, I sank into a nocturnal and rainy atmosphere, and saw raindrops falling on a lake,”  Sala told Dezeen.

“Following this train of thought, I started to work with the idea that the main character in this video should be water. I was interested by the possible effects we could achieve with its movement and light changes,” he said.

Each object from the fallout of an accident, which takes place off-screen, appears on the surface of the water, some emerging from underneath in slow motion and some falling from above to create a series of hypnotic scenes.

To help control this effect, Sala created a series of platforms for each item to stand on within a cube filled with water.

“It is a visual metaphor in which our character has an accident, causing the realisation that the things that surrounded him in life weren’t as important as he once thought,” said Sala.

“The visual idea of the project was to evoke a sense of melancholy and tenderness, states our character goes through, with the help of elegant and poetic imagery.”

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Albert Sala’s music video for John Matthias appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Music Project: a little girl drawn with crayons goes on a journey across the ocean in this animated music video by Rosanna Wan for Tom Rosenthal’s track I Like It When You’re Gone.

Wan drew all of the animation sequences for the music video by hand on rolls of newsprint and then digitally composited them together.

“It was a very economical process,” Wan told Dezeen. “The kid is on one layer and the scrolling background is made up of all these other looping elements.”

Rather than spend time trying to minimise the boiling effect – the wobbly lines that occur in hand-drawn animations because of the slight variations between frames – Wan chose to make a feature out of it.

“There’s a meandering rhythm and melody to the song,” Wan said. “I wanted that same quality to come through in the visuals.”

The protagonist’s journey starts in a small sailing boat, before she jumps into the ocean and continues on the back of a giant fish.

“The idea was to illustrate a simple journey, but to have that journey experienced in a new light, turning it into an adventure,” Wan said. “It’s about enjoying your own aloneness and rediscovering a landscape that has come to be taken for granted. That’s how I interpreted Tom’s song, anyway.”

Tom Rosenthal is a musician based in London. I Like It When You’re Gone is taken from his second album, Who’s That In The Fog?, which was released last year on Tinpot Records.

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Rosanna Wan for Tom Rosenthal appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Music Project: sound artist Holly Herndon collaborated with digital designer Akihiko Taniguchi to create the music video for her latest track, Chorus, which sets out to explore our relationship with the internet through a series of distorted 3D renders of her friends’ messy desks.

Chorus, the title track of Herndon‘s latest EP, is built up from audio samples recorded over weeks of daily internet browsing in an attempt to convey a sense of the sheer volume and variety of content we consume through the web.

“This piece is very much tied to my process of using the internet,” Herndon told Dezeen. “I wanted the track to try to honestly portray the competing narratives going on in my browser and head. I think that a new coherence forms out of receiving all of these different influences, histories, sounds and images in one space and at speed. I wanted to try to capture that.”

To create the video, Herndon and Taniguchi asked their friends to take panoramic photographs of their cluttered desks, which Taniguchi then converted into crude 3D models.

“Akihiko [Taniguchi] and I had been working together on visuals for my live show for some time,” Herndon said. “He developed this system to allow you to investigate 3D renders of rooms, and insert floating objects in them, almost as a live instrument.”

She continued: “It is kind of a celebration of these intimate human spaces that almost always begin with the laptop. Seeing the surroundings around these devices is something really interesting and expressive; it is clear from all of these workspaces that we nest and make ourselves at home around our laptops – and I think that is worth acknowledging and aestheticizing.”

The distortions and irregularities in the 3D renders are designed to create a sense of  unease.

“The more comfortable we get with these devices, the more vulnerable we are,” Herndon said. “We are learning more and more about the NSA revelations; I think it is really interesting that we have never been more intimate with these machines, and at the same time have never had such cause to be suspicious of them. We wanted to capture both of those sides.”

Herndon’s Chorus EP was released on RNVG earlier this year.

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in Holly Herndon’s Chorus music video appeared first on Dezeen.