I love the colors in this frame, but they didn't make it into the video because I blurred out the color contrast too much.
I made this visualizer for one of my favorite Elton John songs. I crunched to get it done in time to show it at a media share day, which was my motivation to get it to a good point. When I have time, I will revisit it and make some more progress. This piece was conceived in my brain for a month or so before I created it, inspired by the many long highway rides during a recent trip abroad. As it turned out, the song is about going away, which also coincided with events that are going on in my life. I'm faced with a sudden move from Portland, OR to Sacramento. I have a lot of big feelings about leaving, mainly sad ones. This song has always felt melancholy to me. It's about a young couple running away to start a new life against the wishes of her father. (Someone tell me why is it always the woman's father that has a problem 😂) I sure wish I was going away with a guy instead of my family.
The process started with listening to this song in the car. As with a lot of my work, I got a very clear visual accompanying the music, which I then reproduced to the best of my ability using Aftereffects and Cinema 4D, with the help of some pre-made assets. I chose soft gradient skies and blurred, almost fuzzy textures. This was good practice with refractive textures. I cranked up the blur property in the transparency channel for the windows, and that combined with the soft silouettes, created the dreamy look of the passengers reflected in the windshield. I tried to create the impression of dawn breaking into blue skies as the hours passed on this journey. My process is very layered, which can create a lot of problems and render-heavy scenes. But I was lucky to catch some happy accidents such as the orange noise lighting up the sky at certain points. Having a richly layered process opens more windows for things like this to happen. I don't always have the intention to do something, but I know what I like when I see it.
This took about 2 weeks from start to finish (and it's not really finished, but I did put that little umm, dedication.... at the end to fill time 😆)