The Sound of The Ladies

In the 10,000 Letters of Love video, there is a hell of a lot of me wandering about and hitting things with hammers and wearing a top hat, but there are also other elements which form the scenes you see, things like trees, raindrops, grass and Zeppelins. I did think about creating more stylised clouds, too, but couldn’t come up with a good approach, so I ended up using a photo of the sky I took. Believe me, I have plenty.

Everything else was created in Processing, a programming language based on Java with a slightly simplified syntax and lots of nice built-in functions for animation and bits of maths. I’ve put a lot of the code on GitHub – bear in mind that the code uses moviemaker, which only runs until Processing 1.5 – later versions gutted the video functionality, which is very irritating.

An orchard of trees. Static ones.

Let’s start with the trees. The structure of this code was inspired by the work of the late, great Alasdair Turner – we use code like this on our course as an example of recursion.  It’s not super-easy to understand, as you have to know a bit about classes and recursive methods and Processing’s matrix formalism. It might not have been the best example to start with actually, but it was the first thing I made, so there we go. Headline: it’s a fractal, innit? I spent ages tweaking probabilities and angles and scaling laws to get something treelike. It’s easy to make a fractal tree that actually looks nothing like a tree, it turns out.

All I did here was to add some sinusoidal motion to each component, and put in some random initial phase to make it a bit more organic. There’s also a version I did which uses a more physical particle-spring type model, but I think I used the simpler version, as the results weren’t quite as good for the full physics model, and it’s harder to write.

The grass was done in a similar way. I created an object that looks a bit like a single blade of grass using some Bezier vertices, and tweaked it to look vaguely realistic. This is a bit easier to follow if you’re new to Processing.

Static grass – originally designed to be cut out on the Silhouette Cameo

Having created one blade of grass, it’s pretty easy in Processing to create a load and give them some sine motion, giving each slightly different sizes, frequencies, and phases. The bottom of the grass is fixed, with the control points and tips varying with time.

The raindrops were created in exactly the same way. I created a raindrop object, and then gave it some “wobble”. Each raindrop has information about its size and position, so again, I could create a load and, for each, link its speed to its size (i.e. perceived distance from the viewer).

I played around with varying degrees of opacity in fill and outline, as well as speed. I really like how massive and slow these lazy raindrops are. Especially in the scene with the plumber, where they’re bigger than his head. Soggy.

The Zeppelins were meant to imply a transition to a populous and urban location. They were a bit of a faff, but not too bad. The zep body was made from a sphere() in Processing, preceded by a scale() function that stretched out the y axis (the direction of travel). The gondola was easy, it’s just a box() with a bit of translate() to put it in the right place. The fins were drawn using a beginShape()/endShape() setup. The rotors are just a series of stretched ellipses aligned using three rotateX() commands, plus a rotateX() command which affected all three and increased with frameCount – this has the effect of continuously rotating all three blades like a rotor. If you’ve done any animation in Processing and know your way around a pushMatrix()/popMatrix() you’re 90% there. Then it’s just a matter of linking these set of display components to a Zeppelin object and giving each Zeppelin a speed and position PVector so it knows where it is and where it’s going. Here are a few in a scene:

(If you don’t code but want to experiment, I recommend downloading Processing and having a play with some of the tutorials).

As I’ve hinted, creating multiple variations on the same objects is easy if you’re programming; you just create one thing you like, add some randomness, and then use arrays and loops to create variations. Brickwork is especially easy – I even though about doing some shadowcasting with a paper brickwork pattern, but it didn’t quite work, visually. I generally combined the different elements in After Effects, but it’s pretty easy to do it in Processing, if you’re so inclined. Above is a combination of a few of the elements in an early visualisation of the “Labyrinth of Brick” (rejected because there are a lot of elements and it was hard to see how this would play nicely with a paper set).

The rainy streaks in the Labyrinth of brick were straight-up asset reuse – they’re just the raindrops from Act 1. “So why do they have tails?” I hear you ask. Well, I’m using my favourite Processing trick of not using a background() call, but instead drawing a rectangle over the whole canvas which is a bit transparent. This means you get after-shadows of each object, and cometlike tails. They even turn up in the last scene, but you hardly see how nice they look spewed out of an outflow pipe:

Earlier in the process, I came up with some initial attempts at backgrounds – using a rising sun/moon,

and latterly, this weird moony spin:

Neither of these quite worked with the sets, for lighting reasons. As soon as decided to use the cloud photo, the sunrise didn’t make much sense visually. The spinny moon thing looks great on its own, but it’s bright enough to shine through a yellow set, which makes no sense – you should only be able to see the moonspin through a window or door. It was going to use it to mark Bazalgette’s Silent Hill-ish transition to the underworld, but I opted instead for the more understated version where the people and Zeppelins disappeared, and the raindrops fell.

Next time, I’ll talk about acting. Or “acting”; and maybe something on compositing and projecting.

So by now you’ve have seen the video for “10,000 Letters of Love” and want to know how it was made. As I hinted before, the answer is long.

So, what you see when you watch the video is a real papercut scene with footage back-projected onto it. The footage is a mix of greenscreened (chroma keyed) live action (any characters, most of them played by me), computer-generated elements which I coded up in Processing (raindrops, bricks, Zeppelins, grass, etc) and a background cloud image which is a photo I took.

Ok, let’s talk about sets. Baby.

This is what it looks like: an ikea picture frame with some card pinned to it and and a bit of furniture clamped on for stability. It sure ain’t purdy. The paper sets go in front, either free or attached loosely with some spray mount, and the projector sits behind and, uh, projects.

I’ve done some papercutting before, for the album sleeves, but these sets needed to be larger and more complex; luckily I only needed one of each, so they didn’t have to be quick to make like the albums. I was keen to create something out of one piece of paper, in the pop-up, 2.5D type arrangement. Not having to glue the sets would mean less chance for botching but also better structural stability.

I used a Silhouette Cameo cutter and designed the cuts in their premium software – here is one of the designs (for the sewer Act 3):

Black lines are cuts, red scores are “valley” (inward) folds and blue scores are “mountain” outward scores. You don’t have to colour code things but it makes it easier to keep track of what the hell’s going on. This is what it looks like all made up; all of these designs underwent various tweaks and revisions for style and stability, so it’s probably not quite the same as the one in the video:

Ingrid Siliakus‘ work was a major inspiration here. Her paper architecture is breathtaking. I bought the book she contributed to, “The Paper Architect“, which has a series of designs that taught me the logic of the more complex popups. The basics of popup architecture are a (horizontally or vertically) folded piece of card or paper, with cuts in it so that an element folds out in the opposite way:

Most popup is basically a variation on that. But how do you do approaching tunnels? And approaching stairs? And oblique stairs? How do you do a piece where linked elements have different depths and heights?

It turns out that the last answer is “make sure that the position of every horizontal fold is self-consistent in both depth and height” – in other words, make sure all the bits it connects to are at the same depth and height as it is. This will either seem obvious or opaque to you, and is not always easy for someone whose internal spatial visualisation is as crap as mine. Studying this book helped me to figure out the rules – the first scene, the village, is inspired by Siliakus’ Hopi village. I didn’t use her design, but I definitely studied it in order to understand how and why it worked. It’s beautiful, too.

(I like this black on yellow effect, but it’s hard to light – hence the yellow-on-yellow you see in the video).

I knew I had a series of scenes that made the story from the song, and broadly that’s what I ended up with. Act 1 is set in a village, it’s the only part of the song that doesn’t exclusively focus on Bazalgette, so I wanted it to be less grand, and a place where a peasant like me might have met him. Act 2 is meant to represent a lecture theatre or grand public space where Bazalgette is being “honoured and badged, imperial-style” (by which I meant “knighted” or “OBEd” or something else empire-y). Scene 3 is his nightmarish “labyrinth of brick” which I knew would be hard to do, as labyrinths are rather confined, traditionally.

The final act was to be set on a beach, but instead I went for something like a pier, because (wo)manmade forms are easier and lend themselves to linear folds more. The tunnels and gates serve as transitions between acts.

Working out how to realise these was hard. The village felt right, but underwent a major redesign to allow Bazalgette a scene within the buildings, instead of in the fields to the viewer’s left, which would have been visually repetitive.

Originally, Act 2 was going to be set in something like a lecture theatre – I was thinking of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford probably, where everyone graduates – but projection essentially has to go on behind the papercuts on a backing screen, or it’s not clear or bright enough to be visible, so I had to do a massive rethink. The theatre boxes seemed a good way to get a few characters in shot but was also in keeping with the opulence of the surroundings.

At this point, I was starting to see motifs developing in the shapes I was using; the thin triangles in the village being vulnerable and quiet; the raindrop shape being tears and messages, but in Act 2 also reflecting opulence and grandeur; so I knew that Act 3 would have to be built from right angles and vertical bars to represent Bazalgette’s confinement and fear as he walks around this weird maze in a fever.

This was probably the hardest bit. A labyrinth of brick is essentially an internal space, not accessible to the camera, and while I did think about creating a series of tunnels it would have got boring fast. It’s also an essentially 3D space and not amenable to the implied space of popup. The design I went for was inspired by the sewer junction in Batman Arkham Asylum; essentially structures meant to imply the carriage or restriction of water, with various access routes for engineers. The vast caverns of the mines of Moria in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings hinted at the idea I wanted – vast functional structures within vaster underground spaces.

Except upside-down. That was tricky. After toying with shooting it right way up and flipping it in software, I realised that was way too hard and got busy with the spray mount. I don’t know why, but the viewer looking down upon an underground city would have given them a freedom that I didn’t want. Having a city of drooping stalagtites protruding from the roof felt more oppressive to me and maybe a bit more grand.

Next time: compositing and coding.

(also available on YouTube)

Well, after months of cutting, clowning and compositing, the video for “10,000 Letters of Love” is finally done. Please do share it around if you like it. It’s from an album called “The City of Gold and Lead“, which is every bit as good. Better, even.

For those interested in the technical details, I’ll be following up with a series of excruciatingly detailed posts. For everyone else, here’s the précis.

The City of Gold and Lead is an album I love, despite having written, performed and recorded it. Apparently people like videos and some people think they make a good advert for the song as well as being an art form in themselves, extending and rephrasing a piece of music, so I decided to make a music video. Something which could capture the mixture of existential dread and surreal humour that I’m going for.

I’d never made a music video.

No one wants to see me singing and playing a guitar, so a performance video was out. I can’t afford actors or sets or lighting or scriptwriters so it would have to be something I could do mainly inside a computer. But animation is slow and I have no drawing skills, so that was out.

This ruled out everything.

And then I discovered the McGuires. Specifically, The Hunter and The Icebook. These two are geniuses, and what’s more, use techniques that are complex (and challenging to do as well as they do), but not expensive: greenscreening, papercutting, back-projection. “Maybe this is something I could do”, I thought naively. There would be important differences, because I didn’t want to rip off their style completely (how well I’ve succeeded in that is open to scrutiny). Kristin McGuire makes exquisite hand cut paper sets; because of my aforementioned lack of draughtsmanship, I’d use a Silhouette Cameo cutter which would mean I could design the sets on a computer and tweak them endlessly before putting blade to paper. Davy McGuire is a virtuoso of Adobe After Effects, but I could also create raindrops, moving trees, and wafting grass in Processing to cover up my lack of compositing chops. And while Kristin McGuire is a trained dancer, I could dick about in a top hat to signify my status as one of Victorianas most respected water engineers.

Three months of learning, cutting, editing, lighting, coding and rendering later, here we are.

The song itself is about love and distance and grandeur and self-delusion, incorporating the historical figure of Joseph Bazalgette, the engineer who designed the Victorian sewer system in response to the Great Stink. Why him? Well, I’m not trying to be all steampunk. I thought of the idea of him being this famous man who would get fanboyed by plumbers, in the same way William Shatner would get mobbed by Trekkies. You don’t get to pick your fans. In the song he’s rather conceited, which I’m told is not what he was like at all. It was only later that I realised I knew his great-great-great-granddaughter, but that’s a different story, ending in her appearance in the video (#spoilers).

This was the nucleus around which the song condensed. “Petrichor”, the smell after rain, features heavily, after I apparently promised to put it in a song for a friend who’d reminded me of the word’s existence. (I don’t watch Dr Who, but I gather it crops up there too). In this song, it doubles for passive or vicarious experience, and latterly the “aura” that precedes Bazalgette’s passage into a nightmare state where he roams his own sewers like a distressed Minotaur, comforted by the loving missives raining down from London. Earlier in the song, “Letters of Love” are the raindrops the sultry, aloof and pining sky bombards the narrator with; here there’s another meaning, if you like. Or they might just be actual love letters.

This wasn’t an easy story to translate to video with no skill and no budget. If you want to hear more about how it’s done, I’ll talk more about it on this blog. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy the video. You are most welcome to listen to more stuff if you like what you hear.

You can also download it via iTunes or RSS.

The latest podcast is out now, in which I cover a Loudon Wainwright III song called Lullaby from his 1971 album Attempted Moustache. In the podcast I talk a bit about how his voice is like smiling balsa wood and mine is like a frowning diving bell, but that’s muso chat, and doesn’t really get into the writing. I’ve only recently discovered his work, and really like the way he weaves in humour in a sweet and understated way. Everyone always talks about Dylan’s humour, but Dylan is categorically not funny, and swings around “humour” in that slightly drunken and clumsy way that Americans in the 1960s did when they actually wanted to be serious and surreal and subversive. Loudon Wainwright has more lightly worn irony and self-deprecation; in Lullaby, it’s a simple song about going to sleep, shedding the cares of the day, but at the same time, there’s the sense that he’s trying to convince himself to relinquish a long-running and bitterly-fought internal battle. I really like the self-deprecation in this, dispensing with the more self-mythologising “fighting his demons” imagery, and  just trying to see the silliness and futility of his struggling and sadness. It’s lovely.

Anyway, the original is here (spotify link), or you can hear my lead diving bell up above.

We’re very excited to be performing at the International Super Friends Network gig on May 22nd (as I write, next Wednesday) at the Black Heart in Camden. We’re especially excited because the audience will be getting a sneak preview of the new video for “10,000 letters of love”, which is pretty awesome. Believe me, I’ve seen it. We’ll be performing the song with the movie projected. It’s going to be beautiful.

Anyway, there’ll be a major unveiling in the coming weeks, but until then, come along and see it next Wednesday, and a night of cabaret, comedy and music. Tickets a paltry £3 in advance from this website.

You can also download it via iTunes or RSS.

The latest Sound of the Ladies podcast is out now on Soundcloud and iTunes, featuring “When the Nuclear Fire Rains Down”, about how we can use the knowledge accrued in museums to rebuild society following an apocalypse, any apocalypse really. Some museums are pretty good for this, for example the Science Museum tells you how to make a toaster from scratch and the Design Museum would let you reverse engineer some fab Conran sideboards – but not all museums are that useful. I’ve picked on a couple of small museums that are lovely, and you should visit (especially the Black Country Living museum, which is about far more than black pudding and hair shirts), and come to the conclusion that my music is a better way to rebuild society. The cult starts here!

The song was written for Museum’s Showoff in March, so enormous thanks to them for having me…

I’ve just finished David Byrne’s How Music Works, a 300+ page tome released late last year (ok, 300 pages is relatively short, but the book is very heavy for a commute). It’s a ronseal title for a book which is a thoughtful and reflective view of music as an acoustical, cultural, technological, spiritual, economical creative beast, framed by David Byrne’s experience as one of the more diverse artists to sell bucketloads of records. If you don’t know him, he started life with Talking Heads, an often difficult-to-listen-to new wave band that nevertheless spawned a ton of hits and became the most influential band in the world in the late nulls when everyone decided afrobeat was amazing.

It’s an uneven read: the beginning and end seem to be especially good. Early on, I really liked his discussion of the way that different acoustic spaces could mould the music performed in them; churches leading to longer, sustained notes, whereas smaller or unenclosed performance venues could allow percussion without it all tripping over itself. The middle really sags – there’s a lot of “when I was doing this album with Brian Eno, we decided to write songs around the sound of the tumble dryer” type moments, which unless you’re a Byrne completist is a bit dull.

I think he flounders a bit when he discusses the science of music – how it affects our brains – and in this and other areas, he can seem didactic and dismissive, dealing with subjects in a brisk, superficial or one-sided way. I get the impression that the reason for this is that he’s trying to create a breezy and accessible style, which is one of the strengths of the book – but in places it means he doesn’t provide very deep or balanced discussions. For the science bits he cites people like Phillip Ball who I would probably rather read on the brain side of music. This is also relegated to the end of the book, as is discussion of Pythagorean rational numbers, the music of the spheres et al – which feels a bit tacked-on.

Where he excels is the areas he’s obviously given a lot of thought to, outside the production of his own records. His dissection of the economics of music is really interesting if you’ve ever wondered how everyone who isn’t Madonna makes a living; and his discussion of the social value of music towards the end of the book chimes with a lot of the things I’ve thought about music for a while. He devotes  a chapter to “Amateurs”, stating:

It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves – they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation.

Leaving the obvious aside, Byrne gets into some interesting discussions about the value of creativity, and creative arts degrees and school subjects to build people’s ability to solve problems, to innovate, and to have innate self-confidence and resilience. I’m beginning to wonder whether a creative arts or even a humanities degree isn’t more useful than a physics degree, but that’s a discussion for another time.

It’s worth a read. Just not all the way through. And I feel like I need to do a hell of lot more reading to get below the surface – but after all, it’s a brave endeavour to take on how music works in 300 pages. Anyway, I discovered “Pulled Up” via 6Music last year, and it’s now my favourite Talking Heads song; as a result, I had it on Brain Jukebox throughout reading How Music Works. Now you can too:

http://youtu.be/dQFOfx3UCkQ

vermox