Strings of Life
Setup
Once I’d finished on a Blue Note inspired alternate cover for this rousing house classic, my plan to animate this quickly snowballed into an almighty mess of a project.
First I edited the tune to a managable length, made a rough animatic to get some camera moves down and to work out how many violin stabs/attacks there are (23), which got me to the end of the build-up.
Next, the keys have to be arranged a particular way if I want to animate them. There’s 3 main types of white key, which need to be arranged in a set manner as real pianos are, and then the black keys have to sit into each space between the keys.
Eventually I got it to work out for me, it took a couple of days coming back to it every now and again – I’d be lying if I said this part was fun or a joy to learn, as it absolutely sucked.
Animation
If you’re going to animate a piano, it’s got to look the part and this was a total ballache, as I can’t play the piano. I found a YT tutorial, compressed to 144P with 1982 graphics quality, on how to play Strings of Life, so I copied the keys I think the guy played and eventually, managed to line it up. Not a fucking chance of getting some cool automated setting with a sound effector to animate the keys, or doing it with a noise layer, or even a Wild West style piano punch sheet. All keyframed. Luckily, that piano break is only 11 seconds long, and it loops *relatively* easily.
And then there was the rendering. Using Redshift on 2 x Titan X and 1 x 980Ti, most frames took 60-90s each, so overall, it took aaages, with several shots needing re-rendering, of course. Or for some other shots, I only worked out I needed them at the editing point.
Compositing
Not so difficult. I added stock dust and smoke instead of doing it via 3D as that would’ve taken way longer to set up and render – and I’m still working out how I can do that with X-Particles..
Anyway, glad it’s over and done with for now…
And there’s more…
I ended up going deep down a rabbit hole with this and built Schudelfloss, a full website/store dedicated to an Acid House Mid-Century design remix project.
And to be fair, acid house and MCM couldn’t be further away from each other in aesthetic – many house and techno records had little or no graphic design to speak of – many were just white labels – so I’ve redesigned some of my favourites with a MCM styling to show how they may have looked if these veritable classics had been released in the 50s and 60s.
This ongoing project joins my love of late 80s – early 00s house, techno, trance, dnb and electronic music in general with the abstract stylings of mid-century era graphic design. Circles, rectangles, shapes and abstract interpretations of sound were the order of the day to visually describe to record shoppers what the music sounded like in the days before wall-to-wall media saturation with YT or Spotify.
Each one of these records were actually released – some were huge chart toppers, some were strictly for the underground.
And if you like this sort of thing, you might like that sort of thing.
