Motion Graphics and Music

 Music videos exist for a reason; to enhance the experience. Music can can convey emotion in an auditiory manner however art and design can do the same through visual stimulation. Music is often accompanied with graphics or animation to highten or convey certain feelings or connotations that otherwise wouldn't be. This can create interesting juxtapositions between audio and visuals not just complimentary imagery.

Oskar Fischinger was a traditional animator who worked on 35mm Film to create one of the first examples of motion graphics. Often naming his works after paintings or classical musical pieces his animations accompanys musical pieces to highten the feeling of the music. His work was innovative and inspirational for future making use of timing, movement, shape and form. 

Oskar was so adamant on sharing his love for sound and colour he created a lumigraph ( colour organ) that operated alongside music. This would make music an experiance and tango of colour and sound.

Kreise (excerpt) by Oskar Fischinger from CVM on Vimeo.

Lumigraph Film (c. 1969) by Elfriede Fischinger (excerpt) from CVM on Vimeo.

Nowadays you cant find a music video without some kind of animation, movie or effects to give it a desired effect and yet somehow the simplicity of some is what makes them work so well.

There is a sense of clarity given through this simplistic monochrome aesthetic. It focuses on a primary shape and alters throughout to leave the viewer with emotion after.

Spherikal from Ion on Vimeo.

synesthaesia and visualising sound

‘The sound of colours is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble.’ - Wasilly Kandisky.

Kandinsky was a believer that music and art were connected and certain sounds could trigger visual responses. From this theory he created many paintings inspired by musical pieces. A visual representation of what the musical piece is. He thought that certain colours present certain moods in tones. Bright happy tones would be represented in yellow and therefore never a bass tone in the same colour. People who associate colours with other things or other senses can often be said to have synesthaesia.

An example of one of his pieces below:

With the concept of using colour, tones and patterns to portray a feeling or mood I attempted to listen to a piece of music of my own and visualise the audio and draw an image of what I thought of. I took a less technical approach and drew with emotion and and feeling.

This was my personal representation of this music piece. I thought of the contrast of romantic tones and the fast paced violent chords combining to create a bittlesweet composition of discord and uneasiness.

The image I drew was based on this musical piece:
Scherzo No. 7 - Andante con Fuoco

I also attempted to give my idea of what type of music I thought a piece of art reminded me of through visual queues. I made this short description based on the image below:

Black and White, simple. Ambient noises with a beat-trip. Soft silences with sharp edges to represent the beats. A sharp digital snare. Spacing gives clarity and ambience to the music/art.

the music it reminded me of:  Nosaj Thing - 'Home' LP

 
 

A good visual example of this practice would be this extract from ratatouille. The food is shown to have a musical and visual stimulating response showing that the main character probably has synesthaesia triggered through foods and that the senses are all connected.

Typography animation - Futura Font

In this session I was familiarising myself with Adobe After Effects with the intention of animating text and transforming it.

Before starting any animating I looked into texts with interesting histories that I could potentially animate about. I chose Futura as it is a clean, popular font with lots of referencing I could mention.


To get started I jotted some potential methods to animate down on paper. I then proceeded to make mood boards of imagery that uses this font and fun or interesting facts about the font. I chose colour schemes and stylist queues I may wish to use in my animation. In this instance it was Bauhaus shapes and colours. The font was the first font on the moon and this inspired the idea of a Bauhaus shape and colour inspired rocket ship that later got cut due to time restraints and lack of skill in the software.

futura font from Sophie Wales on Vimeo.

how is Art like Pluto?

I personally believe debates and opinions in society run on three different levels of fact and opinion. Most arts fit into the soft catagory which is what makes art a good media platform for social debate and interpretation.

Hard  = Pure scientific facts. Water boils at one hundred degrees celcius. This is a proven scientific fact that doesn't not change. You can't have any other opinion to it as it is already a solid known fact.
Medium = Widely known but could potentially be disputed. Heavily regarded through social agreement.

Soft  = Open to interpretation/change and social debate.




"Science Fiction is what we point to when we say it." - Damon Knight on the difficulty of defining the genre.

People who do not read Sci-fi may refer to a Sci-fi work in such a manner as: "Sci-fi? You mean like Star Trek?" They are not wrong in saying this however the Sci-fi Genre scales massively in variety and style and often there is debate of what covers the grounds of what is and isn't a sci-fi movie. The movie 1984 has advancing technologies based on the year it was made but it isn't considered hard Sci-fi in the same way Star Trek may. The genre advances as science itself advanced which is what makes the genre so unique. Often bringing up present political questions and morals with futuristic technology or predictions.

A person can talk about a sci-fi novel without confusion because there is no need to know what makes the novel specifically science fiction. All you need to know is that it IS science fiction because it is already common ground that sci-fi is "like Star Trek".

Not everything in a culture has a strict definition,  however we have points of reference. It is only through cultural representation and agreement through experience and knowledge that we can talk about subjects without needing them to be defined beyond 'sci-fi'.

Modern art is a parallel to this logic. If something seems to not 'fit' within a genre of space it begins to cause questioning and debate. Is performance art, art? Are video games art? This is because until these points peoples gut feelings were previously on common ground dictates different feelings on the subject matter. 

It is only through learning to understand subjects better we can categories things into a 'proper' place. A good example of this would be the planet Pluto. As we learnt more about the solar system we found that Pluto being a planet didn't make as much sense so through cultural agreement we chanced what we thought about it and it became a dwarf. Plutos physical values and structure did not alter in any way before or after the change of it being a 'planet' or a 'dwarf'. The only thing that did change is our opinion on it as  society.
 

Art is a little less solid in definition to a planet (which has scientific values) due to being a cultural topic with cultural meanings. Art was a craft made by humans with no solid boundaries as arts definition is made by society and so is art itself. This is why the definition of art changes over time along with the art itself altering. Socially, people think about art differently through time which caused different art movements and the evolution of art and art forms. read:does art relect society? for a short insight into previous artwork relating to this.

The only acception to this rule would be classic distinguishable pieces of art that have stood the test of time like picasso, mozart as even if someone may not agree with them being art or dislike it. The test of time and cultural agreement allows the subject matter to  be a timeless example of 'true' art.

Paul Lehr - Sabotage

Mass Consumerism Started Somewhere

Immediately after America joined World War II there was a short supply of consumer products. Commodities like rubber, fuel and automobiles were rationed or production ended completely. Even though there were high levels of disposable income and high employment, there was nothing for consumers to buy. After the war ended, economic depression was expected and combined with highly inflated taxes, this made the need for consumerism crucial to recovering the economy. Product marketers therefore started to create new types of products, using the technology gained from the war, along side new mass-production techniques to satisfy the product drought brought on by the great depression and war.

The 'American Dream' and 'World of Tomorrow' ideals were pushed to consumers through new concepts of products such as 'shiny new' TV dinners and futuristic design cars. Food brands, household consumables and any otherwise mundane product groups were given a marketing spruce-up to encourage consumers to make impulse purchases. Consumption was reinforced through patriotic themes of good citizenship in advertising. Mass consumption became even easier with the advent of TV, bringing new marketing strategies and possibilities to promote through video advertising. With animation being popular in the 1940's, it wasn't long before TV advertising also introduced mascots for branding, such as Reddy Kilowatt for Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) created in 1947. This new era of spending is what brought about the first credit cards and the concept of "buy now and pay later".

J.C Leyendecker - Influencial Flash in the Pan

An early 20th century Illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post and Kelloggs cereal, his art became a common sight in modern forms of advertising in america.

J.C Leyendeckers distinct art style grabbed him the chance to advertise Arrow Collar Man and Kuppenheimer Suits the clothing to define the ideal american make of the era. Modern advertising had come into its own and Leyendecker was highly regarded in the commercial artist world. 

His fame was short lived as the 1929 economic crash approached and the suit and tie business popularity declined after 1921 and his commissions soon disappeared as the editor of the Saturday Evening Post was replaced. His work was a product of his time which gives a good sense of era.