Buttonberg

Grindin - Music Video

Grindin' is a song released by the Dutch electro group 'Nobody Beats The Drum' to which a stop-motion video was created by one of the group’s visual artist, Rogier Van Der Zwaag. The video consisted of a series of painted wooden blocks bouncing, sliding, disappearing and appearing in time with the beat and changes of pitch in the song. 

The video was set out in a square symmetrical pattern. It is suggested that the team built a small section of the overall image such as a vertical straight or corner. The actions and movements of the blocks would have been performed in this area and they ‘mirrored’ the production by using editing software such as Premier.

The video was created from 4085 photos and they were taken from the different positions of over 400 blocks that were being used. They were positioned on a plain black background, which enhanced the colours of the blocks and created a good base colour to fill the screen when the music and visual action paused in-between bars.

 Towards the end of the song, it started to speed up and there was a sequence in the video where it repeated all of the previously used movements in a series of quick breakdown flashes.

Colourful Life -  Music Video

Russell Weeks created the music video of Colourful Life, a song released by ‘Cajun Dance Party’.

It consisted of a long scene of watching a car drive along a series of busy roads. The camera was positioned so that the backlights of the car were the main focus of the frame throughout the video. The element that made the video interesting was the fact that there were heart shaped auras positioned around each light that came into the frame on the cars journey.  

It is suggested that Russell used some sought of filter on the camera he used, to create the heart around the lights. Otherwise he may have used a tracking effect to position the hearts during the editing stage.

The video didn’t exactly match the song in the same way that ‘Grindin’ had done, such as the stop-motion in time with the score. However it matched in the way of the feeling that the sound and the visual both gave the audience. The colours of the hearts were ‘mellow’ pastels such as yellows, oranges and blues. The gentle colours matched the gentle rhythm and lyrics of the song.

The video took the boring everyday occurrence of driving and turned it into a slightly more interesting activity from the help of the effects on the lights.

Starry Eyed - Music Video Production

The main object of our Buttonberg assignment was to create a short animation that reflected the music score of a song of our choice. We had one afternoon to plan, one day to produce the animation AVI files and then one morning to edit it all in time with the song and make a cool music video.

I teamed up with Michelle to complete the animation with, and later on Claire also joined or group. However, she was only working with us for 4 hours of the animation day, and was ill for the rest of the rest of the time.

We started by just experimenting with how to use the kit and tried to work out ways in which we could animate our chosen song, a remix of Ellie Goulding's Starry Eyed. We produced a few test fireworks to get to grips with the set up and they actually ended up being quite cool.

We chose Starry Eyed as it had a really strong score which represented plenty of opportunity for an animation to be created. After listening to the song a few times through we selected the first 10s to create our animation to as it represented the best score. We decided to create a few animations containing stars that we could edit to the appropriate lyrics as obviously they would match the song. We also thought it could work quite well to include some better fireworks that we could edit to explode at the same time as high notes or beats.

To create the animations, we used a rostrum camera set up to record the movements of beads, matchsticks and lolly pop sticks.