I’ve heard it said that Art can be a journey of personal discover and I recently discovered just what that means. I’m a professional animator and Rock & Roll is my muse. I’ve been a guitar player in bands since I was in the fourth grade and I’ve managed to produce a few fully animated music videos to my band’s original tunes. When we first decided to start making our videos the plan was our other guitarist, who was a talented artist and cartoonist, would write and design an animated video to one of our songs (one of his songs) that would be relatively easy and inexpensive to produce. Something we knew we could get done and prove that we could do it. At the same time I would design and direct an animated video that would be more elaborate and would be our follow up when the first one got us enough attention to have attracted financial backing (signed to a record label).
As the producer (I arraigned all the needed technical aspects and paid for them) and director (I cut the scenes, timed all the action, read the soundtrack for sync and supervised the photography) of the first video I told the designer to have within each scene a cycle of action (in most cases it was having our character dancing) that can be repeated. The camera can then pan into the scene, or as it eventually turned out in some scenes, animate into the scene, to the character providing action in the form of a cycle and then panning or animating away to the next scene. This worked very well as between the camera moves and the simple cycles the action never stopped and it was all on beat to the music.
I eventually produced two more animated videos for the band after that and although those two didn’t use any cycles the camera moving from scene to scene, moving through each scene and then transitioning by exiting through an open window or somehow panning to a new locale was used to great effect. It was only years after these videos were made that I realized on what all three of them were based. The basic directorial style of all three of these music videos are based on the concept of the rides at Disneyland.
In Fantasyland at Disneyland there are rides based on the various Disney movies. On each of these rides you ride in a vehicle, a car or a boat or a flying pirate ship and you enter a scene from the film taking place before you. There is no character dialogue but music from the film is used as the ride’s soundtrack. The characters as three dimensional figures repeat rudimentary actions in a cycle and remain stationary as you ride by quickly enough that the cycles don’t become too repetitive. You then exit the scene by entering a dark corridor before entering the next scene. This is essentially what my band’s music videos are and I never realized it until years later. What did this journey of self discovery teach me? I guess I’m just a sucker for the rides at Disneyland.
I often ponder the spiritual aspects of Classic Rock but those rides at Disneyland also give me a similar feeling. Besides the fantasy element which requires the use of imagination which is our most direct link to spiritual realms, I think it is the blacklight paint that is used to illuminate the scene that is most important. There is no incandescent lighting on those rides. The ultra violet blacklight gives off no visible light but makes the special blacklight paint glow. It is the glowing, the direct light as opposed to reflected light, that gives these scene their dreamlike quality. It is no coincidence that Rock and Roll psychedelic posters also employ blacklight paint. Both put the viewer in a dreamlike fantasy which some people find rather spiritual.
As the producer (I arraigned all the needed technical aspects and paid for them) and director (I cut the scenes, timed all the action, read the soundtrack for sync and supervised the photography) of the first video I told the designer to have within each scene a cycle of action (in most cases it was having our character dancing) that can be repeated. The camera can then pan into the scene, or as it eventually turned out in some scenes, animate into the scene, to the character providing action in the form of a cycle and then panning or animating away to the next scene. This worked very well as between the camera moves and the simple cycles the action never stopped and it was all on beat to the music.
I eventually produced two more animated videos for the band after that and although those two didn’t use any cycles the camera moving from scene to scene, moving through each scene and then transitioning by exiting through an open window or somehow panning to a new locale was used to great effect. It was only years after these videos were made that I realized on what all three of them were based. The basic directorial style of all three of these music videos are based on the concept of the rides at Disneyland.
In Fantasyland at Disneyland there are rides based on the various Disney movies. On each of these rides you ride in a vehicle, a car or a boat or a flying pirate ship and you enter a scene from the film taking place before you. There is no character dialogue but music from the film is used as the ride’s soundtrack. The characters as three dimensional figures repeat rudimentary actions in a cycle and remain stationary as you ride by quickly enough that the cycles don’t become too repetitive. You then exit the scene by entering a dark corridor before entering the next scene. This is essentially what my band’s music videos are and I never realized it until years later. What did this journey of self discovery teach me? I guess I’m just a sucker for the rides at Disneyland.
I often ponder the spiritual aspects of Classic Rock but those rides at Disneyland also give me a similar feeling. Besides the fantasy element which requires the use of imagination which is our most direct link to spiritual realms, I think it is the blacklight paint that is used to illuminate the scene that is most important. There is no incandescent lighting on those rides. The ultra violet blacklight gives off no visible light but makes the special blacklight paint glow. It is the glowing, the direct light as opposed to reflected light, that gives these scene their dreamlike quality. It is no coincidence that Rock and Roll psychedelic posters also employ blacklight paint. Both put the viewer in a dreamlike fantasy which some people find rather spiritual.
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