Prismatic Fracture

[fraizer]

Robcat spotted this movie on my YouTube channel and suggested I post it to the Forum.  The movie is composited from two clips made in A:M.

First clip (the color pattern):

Years ago I made light boxes using Xmas lights on posts that supported cylinders with cutout patterns; the tops of the cylinders were vaned so heat rising from the lights drove the rotation of the cylinders.  The light patterns were projected onto a sheet of translucent plastic.  Recently I got to thinking about light boxes and wondered if I could simulate the mechanism in A:M.  After some trial and error — that being trying to find a method for doing the cutouts without actually modeling each hole and discovering that while a cookie cutter map would perforate the cylinders, light would not pass through and appear on the projection screen; perhaps someone knows why? — I modeled the cylinders using the brute-force method, lots of CPs and splines.

The choreography is simple.  Two cylinders, one within the other rotating in opposite directions, with red, blue, and green lights inside the cylinders, and a screen to receive the projected lights.  I set the rotation speeds for the cylinders so that it takes more than 10 minutes before the exact same pattern repeats.

Here are birds-eye view captures from A:M showing a wire-frame of the cho set-up, a render of the set-up, and a frame from the resulting movie:

While the colors and patterns are pretty and the simulation is quite representative of the light boxes I used to make, I wondered if I could get something more visually interesting.

Second clip (the black and white pattern):

I decided to experiment with sprites.  I made a simple white square and modeled an emitter to spin the sprites outward.  The result was a little too clumpy.  I put a black edge on the white square and got a much more interesting look.  Rendered with Alpha channel = Off.  Here is a frame:

I edited the final movie in DaVinci Resolve with the sprite clip on top of the color clip and Composite mode set to Multiply.  Here is a frame from the movie:

The soundtrack is a generative music composition I made in LogicPro.  The piece uses standard orchestral instruments with some effects processing — reverb, delay, etc. — and a quasi-12 tone compositional approach.  Each chord in the piece is made up of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, or in some cases 2 and even 3 octaves of notes.  A Probability Gate is applied to each note of each chord in each instrument track to determine whether or not a particular note will sound.  With a sufficiently low probability value, the likelihood of hearing the same music twice is vanishingly small.

The movie is intended to give a pleasant audio-visual experience inducing a feeling of stasis, motion without progress, evolution without advancement, calmness, trance, even a semi-visionary state of consciousness.  Or boredom, perhaps.

Here is the YouTube link to "Prismatic Fracture":

https://youtu.be/Em6VyzsNcgc

 

Best to all,

Joseph

 

[Roger]

Frazier,

Just wanted to say as a long time AM user and also synth enthusiast and amateur musician, I really enjoyed your video and liked getting a "behind the scenes" look into how you did this.   Would love to see more of your stuff.  

 

[robcat2075]

That is trippy stuff, Joseph!

The experimental music composers teaching at the university i went to would have gone ape if they could have done something like that.

A novel use of A:M!

I looked into your cookie-cut problem. I think that may be a bug worth reporting.

[fraizer]

Roger, thank you for your comment.  There are a number of other movies on my YT channel that were made with A:M, all or in part.  Please feel free to look around.  Best.

Robert, I will dig up the cookie-cut attempts and review.  This work was done in v.17, the latest version I have.  Should I send you a project file to test for the issue before posting a bug report?  Perhaps v.19 does not have this problem.  Or I just did not do something correctly...

Joseph

[robcat2075]

12 minutes ago, fraizer said:

Robert, I will dig up the cookie-cut attempts and review.  This work was done in v.17, the latest version I have.  Should I send you a project file to test for the issue before posting a bug report?  Perhaps v.19 does not have this problem.  Or I just did not do something correctly...

I have made a simple case in v19 that demonstrates the problem and I will send that in!

[fraizer]

Excellent.  The graphic I was attempting to use as a cut-out was inspired by Matisse; I thought that would be a fun item to spin around with pretty colors.  But way to complex to model.

To your comment about the music, if you or anyone else is interested in more detail on the compositional method, please let me know.

 

[robcat2075]

Bug report made https://reports.hash.com/view.php?id=7063

 

In all my years I don't think I've ever tried translucency but yours is a great use of it (or would have been!)

[Shelton]

I really enjoyed the video.  Your concept was well thought out and I enjoyed the look of how you composed the animation. Thank you for posting.

[Rodney]

Mesmerizing.

It reminds me of some of those old lead ins for TV and movies back in the 70s that didn't have a lot to do with the show itself but did the job of setting the mood and displaying the talent involved via credits... but yours much much better.