The Arrival from The Arrival by Recursive Eons
Recursive Eons is a new initiative I am taking to create music I personally want to hear. I am a composer for video games, and part of the challenge there is to create music that the developer needs. I have to put aside a lot of my own admittedly strange music preferences in order to create the best experience for the gamer, and what the developer is actually paying for.
In this case, I wanted to hear how heavy and menacing I could make FM guitars sound. So I dissected the best patches from Thunder Force IV on Megadrive\Genesis, found out what made them rad, then proceeded to layer about 4 times more of them than the Genesis could have handled. Naturally, I also can't help but want to add some synth when I am not being requested to do otherwise. Everything kind of worked out to pull me in this direction.
The video was an after thought, but ended up taking more time to create than the song itself. I have an absurd fascination with rotoscoping video, and for some reason I love creating rotoscope animations at much lower resolution than the original footage. This comes with a lot of challenged, mostly regarding how do I deal with all the fuzzy ambient pixels than can get generated. I found some new techniques this time, and rotoscoped some scenes twice, in two different variations. One that is threshold based, and the other that is indexed colour based using a dither setting. In the end, I had to take footage and create nearly hundreds of thousands of images to batch process through Photoshop, then re-import to be turned back to video.
From there, I had to edit various effects to follow the tempo of the music, and even inter splice between the two flavours of rotoscope.
Lastly, I had to create something for the ending of the video so there was not just dead silence and a still screen for the end screen links. I created a grid image and create a video of it rotating. Then applied a ray behind it, and again created an image sequence to send over to Photoshop for another rotoscope. Then bring those images back to Photoshop and create a video out of them. The song and transition were an after thought as well, but something I realized had to be there if I am going to bother doing this at all. That was another night tacked on the tally.
All and all, writing the song, and doing everything with the video, this was about a solid 2 weeks of wild west experimentation. I am here on the other side with a host of new skills, and new ideas.
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Tracklist
| 1. | The Arrival | 2:46 |
Videos
Credits
Recursive Eons
