Concept/ Inspiration

After listening to the piece of music we were given I wrote a list of words which summed up my personal response to it. These were:

Robotic

Interstellar

Loneliness

Despair

Solitude

Post-apocalyptic

Haunting

Fear

Repetition

I particularly wanted to focus on the idea of loneliness with a haunting aspect, and I remembered an animated video for a song by Tool which I thought i might be able to take inspiration from.

The video has an especially sinister feeling, emphasised by the moody lighting and jerky stop-motion animation. I like the way this video has its own narrative, completely separate from the theme of the song but still fitting the overall mood perfectly. Although the movements of the figure itself are not necessarily in time with the music, the strobe-esque lighting and percussive changes of camera angles give the video a sense of rhythm.

As it turns out, the video was mainly conceptualised by the band's guitarist, Adam Jones who was accused of totally ripping off some guys called the Brothers Quay.

And after watching some of their work its easy to see why.

I watched an online documentary with the Quay Brothers, and although their work seems a lot more surreal, their process is fairly similar to that of a music video director - the music is composed and a video is put to it afterwords - the only difference in this case is that, in the end result, the video takes precedence over the music.

Timothy Quay describes their use of lighting as "on the edge of corpuscular; somewhere between that of light or day but at the same time being neither". I think that the lighting is key in giving a sense of tension and hopelessness in their videos and would like to try to use this in my own animation.