Since the beginning of the semester, I have been intrigued by the process of creating visuals to complement audio and vice versa. How one goes about deciding on what to present visually to do the audio justice is my general concept of exploration.
Over the last few weeks, I have been building up a bank of random shots, some static and some containing movement, most of which lie within the experimental realm. I have not been filming with the intention of creating a narrative, rather I have been capturing things that I find aesthetically pleasing. I will continue to do this to add to my selection focusing on the elements of light, colour, rhythm and movement.
I was filming one night on a bridge over the Eastern Freeway and captured the lights from passing cars. Intentionally it was out of focus to create a bokeh effect. The result of this was a stream of colourful circles moving across the image against a black background. It was reminiscent of a video made by Oskar Fischinger – an attempt at reconstructing audio as visuals.
This idea of reconstructing audio as visuals has grasped my attention and I want to thoroughly investigate how visuals are influenced by audio, primarily in abstract music videos for electronic music. I believe that electronic music provides a grounded platform for experimentation; the director has the ability to take control and not be overly influenced by any lyrical content.
So without being too specific, I plan on using this aforementioned footage and edit it to a few snippets of music, resulting in a few separate artefacts/experiments/experimentation, with the ultimate goal of creating music video. I want to place emphasis on the word edit because I intend to get deep into the editing capabilities of Premiere pro and After Effects to see what I can come up with.
I had originally planned to use just my own music, but I now want to work in conjunction with a group of friends who run a music label called Potatoheadz as well. This should give me a nice comparison between something created entirely by myself and something influenced by someone else’s music.
For one of these experiments, I want to take the process used by Fischinger and explore the concept of recreating sight for people who are vision impaired. I have this idea to incorporate the use of braille and audio samples of the alphabet to construct a video relating to sight.
Another experiment I am considering is making a video relating to convolution reverb – a process in music that alters the spacial properties of a sample. My housemate (a member of Potatoheadz) introduced me to this and I want to take one of his exercises and add visuals to the audio component.
This is a basic outline if where I am at with my thought process at the moment. There’s definitely room for these ideas to develop and probably even regress so that I can establish a clearer outcome. But at the moment I feel comfortable enough in my processes and although my research continues to pull me in different directions I am confident in my ability to explore and come up with methods of creating.
– Gabe