It has been some time since I published my last track. There has always been something else on the list that needed focussing on or at least commanded some time and attention. Yet, due to the shutdowns and the fact that the kid is growing older and more independent an old passion slowly sneaked back into my life.
So, I proudly present my latest track "morgen", translating to "tomorrow". Which incidentally neatly sums up my attitude towards making music over the last years and also expresses the hope I have that the next track will follow sooner rather than later.
As I was finishing the track last fall I pondered about what to do with it. Leave on the hard drive, put it on soundcloud or making a video for it ... As there was no release schedule to be kept I went with the later.
Yet in order to get something done in a reasonable time frame I wanted to do something minimal and abstracted and ideally modular so it could be combined and scaled at will and need. With this I could make up for the lack of a narrative and a protagonist and still tell a story for the audience to follow and keeping them engaged.
So the plan was to make several animations with minimalistic shapes to the beat of the track. I settled on predominantly using circles or parts of circles to make up most of the shapes with some straight lines here and there.
The shapes where then layered und scaled to form ever more complex formation throughout the video. By using Shape layers inside of After Effects scaling was not an issue.
The next step in adding visual interest to the animation was by coloring some of the shapes. For this I created several gradients and used the animated shapes as alpha masks.
So, the video starts out in black and white with just a few circles and progresses to an ever more colorful and complex animation before it finished on a colored circle again.
The rest are a few PostFX, color grading and an animated noise for that special bit of visual interest and vintage flair.
Below you can find some of the building blocks of the video.
Animated fractal noise overlay
Building block 1
Building block 2
Building block 3
Building block 4
Building block 5
Building block 6
Gradient 1
Gradient 2
Gradient 3
Gradient 4
Gradient 5
Thanks for watching.
