APD Week 1

This is the submission for Week 1 of APD. The theme for the Week was Play and Self.

WEEK 1

APD W1

Play & Self

The Project link: https://youtu.be/hNsjcVuW9Z0

The project was done in collaboration with a friend (Ishan Kala) who is well versed in music production.

Theme: Play & Self

Context:

During class, Matt told us that we need to have an observation of self, capture the essence of something, tease or unlock something new of your persona (like a different perspective). The first thing that came to my mind was I wanted to include music in this some way. The reason for that is a couple of weeks back before this semester started, I met a couple of people who reignited my love for music production, something I hadn’t done in probably 6-7 years. I decided to reflect and tease that side of my ‘self’ (thereby choosing a different perspective of me).

Being new to animation as well, I wanted to try and see if I can make animations and effects happen by changing aspects of the music. I had seen a lot of videos on youtube which have songs playing with some form of visualiser along with it, which responds to the music. What I wanted to see is if I can create an illustration, break them into assets and then have them animate along with the music.

I chose to collaborate with one of my friends, to get a better understanding of the software that would be involved. Another reason was that doing these effects are a lot easier to achieve, comparatively, if you have the hardware that can support this (something I didn’t have any of). I found a lot of people using the same tools to mainly make audio visual pieces with actual videos (a lot of scratching involved as well). Some examples are as follows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0hJIuaIpw&ab_channel=EboSuite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzN13G5kuUE&ab_channel=EboSuite

I had the idea of assigning each asset of the illustration and assign it to a button which plays a particular instrument. This way we can make them appear, disappear, add effects and animations to them separately to get the desired outcome.

Method: 

The software that we used to make all of this happen were Ableton and ProCreate. I found a plug in for the software that would allow us to implement these ideas. The name of the plug in is EboSuite. One more essential piece of hardware that was used in the process was Ableton Push, which is basically a pad that is used to create MIDI soundtracks.

I used ProCreate to draw the illustration, assets and the animation that supplemented this experiment. I went through a couple of iterations for the design. Once I was happy with my rough draft, I decided which elements I wanted to break down as assets to work with the music and drew in each asset separately.

Response: 

The illustration assets were assigned to the buttons on the Ableton Push device.

Then we created a MIDI track that would fit the idea and setup. We used the drum kit from Ableton and created MIDI samples to make a soundtrack. We had some fun with this as I was my first time working with samples and MIDI outputs. The audio samples were then assigned to these notes and buttons and were triggered with response to the notes. We assigned effects (some visual and some auditory, which surprisingly even had effects on the video itself!) to the knobs on top of the Ableton Push device. These were then used to create additional animation and effects on the assets.

The animated segment controlled through the audio was kind of split into two sections. The first section took the assets and made them appear only when the respective notes were playing, making it look like a trippy glitch effect. I also put my WIP illustration in this segment which pops up for a second too. Felt like an apt way to show how the piece evolved over time. For the second segment, I decided to control when the assets appear manually, and then used the knobs to make specific animations for each asset. I also used some effects from the EboSuite library to jazz up the animation a bit more.

I have attached images of the hardware and a video as well as to how the knobs affect the animation of the assets.

I chose to do the animation the way I did to portray an aspect of what’s in my head, therefore showing a different perspective of my ‘self’.

I also made sure that the full video can loop itself to make it more aesthetically pleasing.

Reflection:

This process was not only collaborative, but also very experimental, for the both of us, as we were not really sure if it would work or turn out the way I imagined it. There was also a lot learning required to figure out parts of Ableton for me, and also figuring out the plug in EboSuite. There was definitely a learning curve with EboSuite. I do have to say the final effect was a lot more effective than I initially imagined it would be. But I think taking time in figuring out the software and plugin definitely paid off at the end. We did see some effects through the production process that were unplanned and turned out to be very aesthetically pleasing.

There was a lot of constructive play involved by using the theory of loose parts. The end product was goal oriented and well thought out in terms of production and had a lot of separate materials that were moved, redesigned, taken apart and put back together in weird ways.

“From one moment to another memory steps back to rediscover the past”
― Munia Khan

The rediscovery happened due to the similar moment I found myself in after 7 years, where I was once again jamming and creating music. This inspired me to experiment with a side of me that was not explored in a long time. Mixing that with a version of my 'self' that I am discovering through animation was a very satisfying experience.

Neither of us expected how much could actually be done with these tools and software. Moving forward, we decided that we will try making short pieces driven either by music or the illustration to create interesting pieces like this. Apart from the final piece and the process itself, I think the collaboration was something that I took out of it the most and hopefully will shape into something more fun and experimental for the future.

The link to the project: https://youtu.be/hNsjcVuW9Z0

References:

• EboSuite, 06 Oct 2020, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0hJIuaIpw&ab_channel=EboSuite>

• EboSuite, 16 April 2021, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzN13G5kuUE&ab_channel=EboSuite>

• EboSuite, 26 May 2021, < https://youtu.be/2p2Vo9Yh300>