IOL Week 9 - Vivaldi's Four Seasons (Spring)

This week’s response had me creating a live animation to the sounds of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons - Spring - Allegro. I have been thinking a lot about this symphony lately, it was on in my house a lot when I was a kid and I just love it. I was playing around with an idea of a piece that could be presented where the viewer has the option to watch and listen to whichever movement from it they would prefer, and so made this. I decided to draw this in a portrait aspect ratio, so that I could fit each season on screen at once. I also originally intended on adding colour to each season, however through the making of this I fell in love with the black and white aesthetic. Maybe with a different brush texture colour might add more but I felt with this it detracted.

The way I animated this was in TVPaint with a clip full of empty instances, holding down the CONTROL key and drawing live while listening to the music. Ben assisted by drawing one pass of this while I did each of the others.

One of the limitations with this feature in TVPaint is that it will not continue playing and capturing if you remove the brush from the tablet or screen, so by the end of the piece the artist’s arm might become tired, depending on the length of it and the amount of enthusiasm the artist is putting in to it.

I then brought this into After Effects and duplicated it three times to make the repeated effect, flipping the video vertically on each second one.

I feel that this was a very successful test and would like to continue further with this idea. I feel that this test situates itself nicely amongst the works of McLaren, Lye and Fischinger. Obviously not to their level but as related works.

I would like to push this further and may use this piece as a base for my IOL Project.