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Always is a single channel video piece, part of a trilogy entitled The Ends of the Earth. The theme of the trilogy is love, each piece deals with this theme in a different context, in the case of Always the subtext of the piece is romantic love. It consists of a single 5 min. shot of a cloud dancing in time to music in front of a snowy landscape. The cloud and the landscape were all computer generated. The motion of the cloud was synchronized with the music by a laborious animation process that required a spread-sheet containing more than 30,000 separate data cells.
Click HERE to see the Animation Spread-sheet.
This piece is about loss, and to some extent, regret. The movements of the cloud are slow and graceful at first, occasionally becoming more dynamic, alternating between apparently natural and obviously artificial. After a short time it becomes clear that the cloud is dancing in time to the soundtrack, the melody of the well known love song “You Were Always on my Mind” played on the vibraphone. This version of the song was specially recorded for this project by a classical percussionist playing in a church. The rich metallic tone of the vibraphone reverberating in the huge space of the church lends a dream-like atmosphere to the soundtrack. This suggestion of a timeless floating state is matched by the video sequence in which the landscape is slowly enveloped by a pink fog. The piece ends as the music fades away, and the cloud dissipates into the pink sky.
This piece originated with the song, in particular the lyrics which seem to me to describe a relationship that is far closer to reality than is normally found in a love song, this is a song steeped in regret, rather than passion or pain. I wanted to create a piece that deals with the ways that we fail to achieve the ideal of romantic love, whilst at the same time recognizing the beauty and pathos of this essentially human impulse. In this sense I created the kitsch-sublime synthetic landscape and the cloud as visual equivalents of the song. From the beginning I wanted to create this piece in a way that reflected a sense of emotional failure, the 3D digital animation process that I used to create the dancing cloud is particularly laborious and requires meticulous mathematical manipulation of a series of algorithms to create the illusion of a living cloud. This forced me to work in a way that was completely at odds with the kind of impulsive expressionism so often associated with the artist, whilst at the same time attempting to create an emotionally engaging image of regret personified.
Always is a single channel video piece, part of a trilogy entitled The Ends of the Earth. The theme of the trilogy is love, each piece deals with this theme in a different context, in the case of Always the subtext of the piece is romantic love. It consists of a single 5 min. shot of a cloud dancing in time to music in front of a snowy landscape. The cloud and the landscape were all computer generated. The motion of the cloud was synchronized with the music by a laborious animation process that required a spread-sheet containing more than 30,000 separate data cells.
Click HERE to see the Animation Spread-sheet.
This piece is about loss, and to some extent, regret. The movements of the cloud are slow and graceful at first, occasionally becoming more dynamic, alternating between apparently natural and obviously artificial. After a short time it becomes clear that the cloud is dancing in time to the soundtrack, the melody of the well known love song “You Were Always on my Mind” played on the vibraphone. This version of the song was specially recorded for this project by a classical percussionist playing in a church. The rich metallic tone of the vibraphone reverberating in the huge space of the church lends a dream-like atmosphere to the soundtrack. This suggestion of a timeless floating state is matched by the video sequence in which the landscape is slowly enveloped by a pink fog. The piece ends as the music fades away, and the cloud dissipates into the pink sky.
This piece originated with the song, in particular the lyrics which seem to me to describe a relationship that is far closer to reality than is normally found in a love song, this is a song steeped in regret, rather than passion or pain. I wanted to create a piece that deals with the ways that we fail to achieve the ideal of romantic love, whilst at the same time recognizing the beauty and pathos of this essentially human impulse. In this sense I created the kitsch-sublime synthetic landscape and the cloud as visual equivalents of the song. From the beginning I wanted to create this piece in a way that reflected a sense of emotional failure, the 3D digital animation process that I used to create the dancing cloud is particularly laborious and requires meticulous mathematical manipulation of a series of algorithms to create the illusion of a living cloud. This forced me to work in a way that was completely at odds with the kind of impulsive expressionism so often associated with the artist, whilst at the same time attempting to create an emotionally engaging image of regret personified.
