Until You - An Audiovisual Project
Until You is my first single under Samus Design as well as my first audiovisual project. Until You was created with Ableton Live 10 and Blender 2.8
This music video project was intended to become something of a portfolio. The ideal outcome would be to show it to someone as a succinct way of answering the question: “what do you do?”
I used a music video module in my second year of university to force myself to learn Blender. The first project was messy and simple but it helped me try out what I thought was the “right” workflow. For that project, I made the visuals as short clips, added sound design to them individually, then cut up the videos into an abstract piece. I had a hard time working like this as it required me to completely finish a lot of rendering before I could start working on the sound design in an efficient way. (Not to mention I hadn’t discovered Eevee rendering yet so 250 frame renders took upwards of 6 hours.) I’ve since made a trailer for a sample pack, which taught me even more about getting these works finished efficiently. Instead of working linearly like the first project, I could almost describe the creation of this project to be cyclical. Now that I have blender under control, I can create renders faster than ever. I’ve also gotten more proficient with ableton so the whole process is considerably less painful. I found myself making new renders and working on the track whenever I felt the right inspiration. I also began to create new visuals as I needed them during the editing process.
For example, Towards the end of the video, toruses start appearing more frequently. This was a conscious decision I made as this part of the video began to take shape. I decided that I needed more visuals that included this shape and created 5 more in the space of a couple of hours.
The track was created from an initial loop in ableton. I’ve started taking distortion a lot further since hearing pieces from artists like Mick Gordon and decided to create a simplistic techno track with sounds reminiscent of his Doom soundtrack. I was also inspired by Rezz and her ability to create a track like Edge where timbre plays an extremely strong role in the composition. I wanted to focus on rhythm and timbre throughout the track as these are my favourite parts of tracks by the aforementioned artists.
This concentration on timbre lead to signal chains that look like the one shown below
When Considering the project initially, I was heavily inspired by Emptyset, including their live visuals. Emptyset use an analogue approach but I wanted to capture the distorted visual style using simple shapes in blender. Emptyset use a speaker driver next to the cathode gun of a crt display to create actually distorted videos that react directly to sound. I wanted to create a more directed experience. By deciding to create visuals that I would edit together later, I gave myself freedom to create anything I wanted as visual material, as long as it fit the visual style I was already using.
I found Author and Punisher to be particularly inspiring as his main timbre is of distortion. This kind of “hardcore” sound is what gave me the confidence to push so far into synth sounds that I may have previously considered to be “too harsh” I also found that artists like Lorn inspired me to do as much as possible with few instruments. In the past, I’ve leaned into adding more and more to tracks in an attempt to make them better simply by virtue of being more complicated. Lorn’s use of distant, distorted, wailing synths to create tension simply by creating an almost scary atmosphere was very inspiring. For mixing and mastering this kind of sound however, I turned to Ital Tek and his new album “Outland”
I hope my project brings a directorial feel to the “dark techno” genre. By this I mean that the visuals and audio marry well enough that they meld together into one complete experience. I’d love for the track to stand up on its own as a creative and interesting techno track as well as being the audio-half to an audiovisual piece. I hope that the people who watch the final piece feel like the visuals and audio came from the same machine in an abandoned warehouse made to generate dark techno and upload it to the internet.