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Heart Animation

One of the key elements of my treatment of the music video for my chosen song is to display its timings in accordance with the music. As the opening part of the song is so recognisable and distinctive I think it is important to display this visually, and in time. This visualisation was created by drawing out a rather quick hear illustration, and then exaggerating it to make it look as if it were beating. The difficult part is making it beat in time with the song, so I decided to use Premier Pro to try and match the distinctive beats of the piece of music to this pulsating heart. This was done by working out where the dB levels were at their highest and then dropping in the second heart drawing in at these points systematically.

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Background Illustrations

When visualising the treatment that I am going to give my idea for the music video, I’ve created some backgrounds with appropriate colours to give a sense of atmosphere to my film. These are purely in place the help the viewer / client visualise what is in my mind when I’m talking about the film. Whilst simplistic I have tried to create them in the same textured style of the isometric drawings I have created previously.

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Inspired by the way that David Wilson creates visual treatments of his ideas, I want to showcase the central ideas for my own music video in a similar way. Much like David Wilson says, I think this way of working in presenting a moving image or sequence rather than a static storyboard works much better in tying the video the sound itself. There will be voice over, recorded by an actor, over the top of my storyboard illustrations that indicate key times, and explain the narrative. This is the clip of the opening sequence, I think introducing the idea with a human face is a much more personal way of getting my idea across.

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Music Video script

Daniel Bedingfield — GOTTA GET THRU THIS A Treatment by Ryan Wooding

*Looking into camera*

The whole film will be set in a mixture of two-dimensional…and three dimensional environments, using traditional drawn animation techniques, against a physical set.

The Narrative

A small lifeless toy bear is laying alone on a brightly coloured backdrop. The camera slowly pans in

onto him, focusing in on his chest - just about where the human heart would be. This area of his chest is then opened up, to reveal the stuffing inside. Tucked away in this stuffing is a tiny, motionless heart - either drawn or made of modelling clay… — As the instantly recognisable first few beats of the song begin to play, the heart begins to beat in time with the music. — Then…suddenly as the drums kick in, the bear shoots up, his chest is closed and his eyes open - with a bewildered kind of a gaze upon his face. The bear is then seen looking down to his paws… left, then right. He begins to stand up, just in time for the first line of the song “I’ve got to get through this.” — The camera then pans around to the back of the, now upright, bear’s head to reveal a surreal geometric environment before him. Populated by a few 3-D shapes such as cubes and prisms - but also, oddly, a cactus tree. — This is symbolic of a desert-like place, or somewhere that is hard to get out of. As the song implies. The camera then spins around to show a determined look on our hero’s face. And then back around to the back of his head, as he begins to sprint towards the cactus in front of him. — As the intensity and speed of the drum beat starts to ramp up, our hero bear then jumps into the cactus and, seemingly, through it just as the snare drum hits. — Our hero has now made it through the cactus and appears to actually inside of it. The environment should now be a shade of green, with moodier lighting to suggest to the viewer that we are now, in fact, inside of something. — Our bear, after quickly looking around, then begins to run forwards as we follow him side on - a little like a platform video game. The wall behind him is covered with little yellow holes, which indicate the yellow spikes of the cactus on the outside. — [INSERT CLIP OF LITTLE BIG PLANET] — As the verse of the song continues, the platform we see then begins to steepen as he makes his way across it. And the look on our hero’s face becomes much more anguished as this happens. This continues until our bear is scaling an almost mountain-like platform, incredibly steep as his pace slows. — Fortunately for our hero, just before the line “give me just a second, and I’ll be alright” the platform begins to ease, and level out as we find our hero laying on his back. The camera now over his face as he begins panting, and resting. — *Looking into camera* This particular scene is intended to symbolise the inner-turmoil of the mind…and how quickly it can become unbalanced, if we don’t allow ourselves time to think and recover. — Back in our created environment, our bear is about the encounter his second ordeal. Still laying on his back, yellow spikes begin falling towards him from above, and he struggles from side to side to dodge them as they stick into the ground — cracking it like ice. — As the cracks deepen, the floor opens and our hero is plunged through it – clutching on the spikes as he begins to fall, signalled by the final hit of the bass drum. As the floor opens, the background is converts from the green, to a more tropical pink. — The camera retains its position as our hero falls further downwards, getting smaller and smaller as the scene progresses. The shot then suddenly cuts to our bear, mid-fall, clinging onto his spike in an isometric view. And then zooms in again to show our bear clearly falling at some speed. — [INSERT CLIP OF ANIMATED WRESTLERS FALLING] As each of the yellow spikes begin to plummet to the ground, we see them disintegrate and disappear. Our hero, clearly in trouble, has to clamber from spike to spike before it too falls apart from pressure of falling. — This happens a total of three or four times before our camera quickly cuts to underneath the action, looking upwards from a new floor level. We can then begin to see our hero above us, hurtling towards the ground. — He finally then hits the floor with an almighty thud, as the bass drum signals the end of the verse and the final chorus begins to open. — As the song begins to close, the camera, looking at our bear from above once again…spins around his head as he lay motionless for a second, before he slowly opens his eyes. The camera zooms out ever so slightly, to reveal that we are now back in the real world, and the bear is simply laying on his owner’s bed and the camera fades to black. — END

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My two final options for the album sleeve cover. One relying on the typography to communicate my idea, whilst the other displaying it through a more abstract drawn illustration. The isometric drawing relates a lot more to my idea for the music video, but there isn’t any suggestion of a rule where the album cover and the music video have to be in any way linked or related. Providing the themes and mood of the song are communicated across both.

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Experiments with tonality and line thickness in a similar way that it is used by Hanse van Halem. The lines really bring out the letterforms and created an incredibly interesting piece, although I feel like the drawing is starting to get slightly contrived and doesn't in fact need over complicating. I think that the words of the song drawn in this blended style are strong enough on its own. I do really like the tonality that these lines bring, its just that the morphing of each of the letters into one another, the fact that they appear to be trying to ‘get through’ one another is much more clear without the additional background noise.

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Inspiration — Hansje van Halem

Looking around for typographic inspiration for my piece, I came across the work of Hanse van Halem who's systematic work combines legibility and irregularity. A combination which is very polarised yet when applied in a way such as van Halem’s work becomes incredibly harmonious and well suited to the kinds of graphics that I want to create in relation to visualising sound.

She has continued drawing intricate, perspective-bending typography, patterns and illustration. Much of her work is hand drawn, Hansje reasoning that she “finds repetitive work soothing” and enjoys “the tension between a systematic approach, legibility and (ir)regularity.” Her drawings manage to be bright, incredibly detailed and optically confusing whilst having just the right amount of knowing restraint to be readable.

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After viewing the typography applied to my vinyl record mock up itself, I began to wonder whether it would be possible to make this piece of typography as visually interesting as the front cover sleeve. I started playing around with the ‘Blend’ options within Illustrator, a technique I’ve used before on a line drawing, but never applied to text. This feature blends each of your outlines into one, by repeating itself a number of specified times from the first line to the last.

I was extremely surprised at the effectiveness of this experiment in relation to the ideas I’ve been exploring when looking at visualising the track. Not only does the drawing appear like some kind of sound wave, each of the letters look as if they are trying to ‘get through’ or push through and morph into each of the letters before it. The original shape of the type is retained but the repetition and blending of the letterforms creates a sort of web or net drawing over the top of it, similar in style to the very architectural isometric drawings I had been creating before.

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Typography

In terms of typography I think the font choice should be secondary to the drawing, and not distract too much from it as it is this device that is communication the key message of the piece. I have therefore decided to reference the font choice of the original album release, which is set in either Arial or Helvetica; I don’t think it is too important as to which.

Looking around at more interesting variants of the Grotesk such as Akzidenz and Monotype Grotesque, I eventually came across a typeface by Colophon named La Fabrique. The font is very similar to the one used on the original album but, I feel, with a lot more of a personality. The stylistic quirks surrounding the design of key letters in the words I am setting such as the upper-case ‘G’ ‘S’ and ‘R’ feel rather more unique as letterforms than the overly familiar use of Arial / Helvetica. The typeface feels similar enough to the original that can be seen as a reference, yet different enough that it takes the design forward into a more contemporary direction.

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Inversion

My favourite outcome of the experiments so far, this drawing was created by simply inverting the colours of the textured gradients that I had originally created. I would argue that this drawing fits much closer to the themes of the sound itself, the turmoil of the mind, because of it’s moodier appearance. The textures reference the haziness of a mind in turmoil, attempting to piece itself back together and think clearly. It strikes me that this image would also work perfectly as an album cover for the song also, which would be a nice link to the themes explored within the music video that I hope to create.

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Combining Colour and Texture

As a third experiment, and out of curiosity I wanted to try and apply the gradient texture that I had made to the original drawing that I had made. This is an experiment that I was very happy with as it met my criteria of both creating a world that appears surreal and hard to navigate, with all of its differing levels and Escher-like composition. It also has that blur between a digital and analogue drawing that I always like to strive for within my practice. The one observation that I did make however, was that I think the colour palette is ultimately too similar to that of the Orange Box.

One possible way to get around this would be to use varying colour palettes within the music video, so in essence the orange being used as just one palette of many. Another solution would be to take the drawing back to monochrome, or even inverting the monochrome drawing so that it is transformed to white on black.

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