Mario Building (Week 1 Theme: Observation)

Theme: Observation

Context: I was drawn to the brown building outside as it reminded me a lot of the music visualisations created by the The Music Animation Machine and a rhythm game I played a lot of my iPad called Magic Piano by Smule. The random light coloured bricks were like musical notes that were ready to be played when it hits the grey bar - the whole building facade was like a musical score.

Method: Animate a still photograph taken outside the building based on a piece of music. I went with the Super Mario Theme because the nature of the bricks reminded me of the 8-bit video game tunes and MIDI songs. Super Mario had a well-known theme with a catchy melody that I thought would be easy to animate.

Response: I started off just taking random photos inside Building 7 and outside on Bowen St and observing all the objects around me. After seeing the brown building outside, and actually studying the facade in more detail (normally, I'd just walk past it without noticing these details), it reminded me of a music visualisation, and the hole in the building also made me think of the structure of a guitar, which led me down the path of music. I did my photo editing in Photoshop, and the animation was done very quickly in After Effects; but I feel like there could be a more effective way to do this - e.g. importing and analysing a MIDI file, and using programming to generate and animate the bricks across the screen. I didn't realise how tedious it was to manually animate each brick! I positioned each brick according to the musical note in the Super Mario Theme score - with the lower notes starting from the bottom, to the higher notes near the top.

Music credits: Super Mario Theme by Koji Kondo