Bearer & Dancer

The song »Bearer & Dancer« has quite a peculiar structure. I decided to follow it’s scenes and give each of the lyrics protagonists their own visual representation. Both adapt to the very pulsative start and the bands typical flowing finale.

Particle simulations for both scenes were a good choice to accommodate the strong dynamics of the music. I picked my proven workflow in Processing combined with Vezér, which I created in the past. It allows preview in real-time and full quality during creation of the animation. Later on, the animated scenes were rendered to a movie file, while only minor post processing was necessary.

In addition, we have also worked on three other visuals for the band’s album release tour »Wilderness« as Blood Brothers.

technical insights

For this type of process I always felt a lack of a 3D editor in Processing. So I was keen to check out Unity 3d as an alternative. I picked Keijiro Takahashi’s awesome Kvant/SwarmMV and Kvant/SprayMV assets. Working with these and the 3D editor has been a breeze.
For timeline editing I picked the Unity asset Cinema Director - Cutscene Editor since it seemed to be neat to do coding and animation in the same place.
Unfortunately the timeline editor did not meet my expectations that I had from my experiences using Vezér. It might be good for games and so called Cut Scenes, but I faced major usability issues with editing keyframes and curves to control Unity Game Object properties. As of writing this in 2016, the Cinema Director just doesn’t seem to be ready for this kind of workflow yet.
I’m looking forward to switching back to Vezér in the future. A port of the stable OSC synchronization between the timeline application and renderer I built in Processing will be necessary though.