Music: patterns of light spring up close to a Martian-like world in this music video that directors Pablo Barquin and Junior Martínez developed for Floating Factors (+ film).
Martínez presently knew Sam Shepherd – the musician behind Floating Points – ahead of the notion for the video came about.
Soon after introducing Shephard to Barquin’s work, the Spanish directors formed a staff that also incorporated Anna Diaz Ortuño and Nathan Grimes to generate visuals for the track Silhouettes.
“We wished to do a video with a technical achievement, but with an abstract story and a truly artistic touch,” Martínez advised Dezeen.
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Combining Shepard’s music, Martínez’s layout fashion and Barquin’s inventions, the group made the decision to create the visuals using light painting. The technique makes use of lengthy exposure photography to capture the path of a moving light source as a trail.
“I was enjoying close to with my very first light-painting machine prototype and I imagined it was a excellent chance to take the technical notion additional and do an total video with it,” Barquin explained.
Their references incorporated the work of abstract animator Oskar Fischinger, notably from Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia.
“Sam’s music is genuinely cinematic and soulful, we needed to catch the feeling of this by performing it all photographic and colourful, as well as producing the light to paint the melodies of the track,” mentioned Martínez.
The video starts with landscape imagery picked to search like the surface of Mars, filmed at the Rio Tinto valley in southwestern Spain for its arid circumstances and distinctive red colouring.
Moving light paths start to seem as simple abstract shapes, which flicker and bounce close to the scenery.
“It’s a mysterious light from the sky, that arrives in a desert landscape and oscillates in buy to discover its accurate form and harmony,” Martínez said.
As the video progresses, the light shapes become a lot more complex – based mostly on oscilloscope compositions and mathematical formulae.
To develop the effects, the team created and constructed a three-axis personal computer numerically controlled machine from scratch.
“The machine is capable of reproducing, in light, any type developed in 3D animation software,” explained Barquin. “It is controlled by a bespoke plugin, into which we introduce 3D animation files that can be translated by the machine into bodily area.”
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“The LED traces the path of the animation and reproduces the motion frame by frame,” he continued. “The exact same software program that controls the machine also controls the camera and external aspects such as lights, movement-manage techniques and remote cameras.”
Though some scenes had been shot on place, other folks had been captured at the Hamill Industries studio in Barcelona.
In direction of the finish of the video, the camera pans out to demonstrates viewers what it looked like behind the scenes.
It reveals a miniature landscape populated with soil and plants, developed on a table leading – a single of three artificial sets constructed to look like Rio Tinto for filming.
“At the finish we desired to display a peek of Pablo’s studio with Nathan and Anna doing work as well, just to get men and women curious,” stated Martínez.
“In the video, story and the strategy are indivisible so it was almost essential to us, to do a modest revelation at the end,” additional Diaz Ortuño.
The team invested a complete of two and a half months shooting the video for Silhouettes, which is taken from Floating Points’ forthcoming album Elaenia, due for release six November 2015.
