Hasta La Ideas

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: 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.

Dezeen Music Project: artist Isobel Knowles used cut-out paper shapes to create the animated underwater scenes of dancing swimmers and fish in this music video for Australian singer Sally Seltmann’s single Catch Of The Day.

Knowles used stop-motion animation to give movement to the paper shapes, shooting each element separately and building up the synchronised compositions digitally.

“The animations are shot frame by frame using a camera and a light box,” Knowles told Dezeen. “I shot most of the elements separately and then composited them, changed colours and added effects digitally, layering up each scene from small parts.”

Without a brief from Seltmann, Knowles was free to create her own interpretation of the track, which is the second single taken from the singer’s forthcoming album Hey Daydreamer.

“The music is quite rich sonically, but still quite simple and pop,” Knowles said. “I wanted to reflect this richness and playfulness with the visuals.”

“The cascading harps at the beginning of the song just instantly made me think of underwater scenes from movies and cartoons, so I followed my initial reactions.”

The post Paper fish dance to the beat in Isobel Knowles’
music video for singer Sally Seltmann appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Music Project: Berlin videographers False Manners Productions mixed fluids including milk, food colouring and make-up remover to create the cosmic patterns accompanying this track by producer Quenum.

Fernanda Mattos and Federica Marchese of False Manners Productions immediately associated Quenum‘s chilled-out 5AM track with natural phenomena and galactic movements.

“5AM is a very romantic track,” Mattos told Dezeen. “We couldn’t stop associating it with an amazing sunrise, the movement of the stars and all the planetary motion.”

The duo used all the fluids they could find in their homes and experimented with mixing them together to form the desired densities, shapes and patterns.

“We went back to study basic science and interactions between different fluids, densities and compositions,” said Mattos. “We used a lot of different stuff – so many trials that we lost count. Of course we used water, milk, food colouring, different oils. We basically took everything liquid that we had at our places, including a fancy eye make-up removal.”

Movements caused by stirring the concoctions and liquids reacting with one another were filmed close up to capture the detailed patterns flowing past the lens.

The video starts with illuminated large colourful blobs and smaller speckles that could be mistaken for glowing planets and sparkling stars.

The subsequent visuals show colours swirling in layers, creating patterns reminiscent of cosmic dust clouds.

Globules of oil move around each other like orbiting celestial bodies, then coalesce into constellations.

“[The visuals] make you dream, wonder and let you flow through the universe,” said Mattos. “An authentic landscape for such timeless song.”

The video took the pair a full weekend to shoot, then a few more days for editing and post-production.

“We withdrew ourselves into the studio from Friday morning until Monday afternoon, non-stop day and night,” Mattos revealed. “We ended up with so much footage that it took us a few days to prepare the files and select the approved material.”

5AM features on Quenum’s latest LP Face to Face, released with record label Serialism. False Manners Productions also produced the videos for the three other tracks on the album.

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in Quenum’s 5AM music video appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Music Project: in this music video by animation designer Nick Cobby, billowing forms are used to visualise a gentle piano solo and spiky geometric shapes appear when electronic sounds are played over the top.

Nick Cobby created contrasting visuals for the different styles heard in the track Fragments of Self, created by musician Max Cooper and featuring pianist Tom Hodge.

Circular forms expand one after another in time with the piano keys and disperse into alien-like tentacles, lines and dots as the notes resonate.

When the electronic glitches kick in, the visuals dramatically change into sharp, spiky shapes that pulse and distort with the beat.

“The track hit me as having two very different styles to it, so I wanted to create two polar opposite visuals – one that followed the piano and one that came in with the glitch effects,” Cobby told Dezeen.

“The piano was more of a free-flowing sound so I wanted some kind of natural or organic element, while the harsh glitch needed to be mechanical, sharper and more defined.”

The movie is purely black and white until muted colours appear as the piano is reintroduced on its own. The colour flickers off again towards the end of the track.

“It didn’t strike me as a video that should have lush colour,” Cobby said, “except for the middle part of the track when the piano comes back in after all the glitch. It sounds so peaceful and I wanted some colour to subtly come in to help signify that.”

Cobby used Adobe After Effects and Trapcode Particular software to create the visuals in time with the music.

“I used a plugin [for visualisation software Particular] called Sound Keys to monitor the waveform of the piano to create the pulses – but with a lot of manual keyframing as well to tweak it,” he said. “I’m a big fan of just using one or two methods to create a whole video, as I think the restriction helps me to be more creative.”

“I wanted the viewer to feel very calm at one point then really on edge the next,” Cobby added. “That’s how I felt when I heard the track and what I really liked about it, so hopefully that comes across.”

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rings and angular shapes appeared first on Dezeen.