A Fake La gloire à mes genoux
Project Description
My project is about a French song, La gloire à mes genoux from musical Le Rouge et Le Noir L’opéra Rock. From the very beginning, I thought that I could change the output of Max totally according to my thoughts, so I decided to make the melody and rhythm according to the song and also create a changing background that can be displayed (in my imagination) even in the theater. That’s how my idea came out.
Perspective and Context
Since we are required not to use any outside source video for our project, the video we produced is 100% from the audio input. Similar to Norman Mclaren https://www.nfb.ca/film/synchromy/ (though mine is much more ugly), our video and audio are one. Since my inspiration comes from musical, which is a form of artistic expression that shows strong use of visual music, synesthesia, and audiovisual systems, coordinating music and visual expression at the same time. Therefore, letting the audience see the change in visual with the change in rhythm is important for my project.
Development & Technical Implementation
For the audio part, I produced the rhythm of the prelude, and I tried to have the melody of the first part but I failed, so I put the original song into the cell instead of an electronic video file I have downloaded. Therefore the audio output sounds a little more like the song La gloire à mes genoux that I am imitating.
For the video part, Eric helped me put so much effort into the color style. Since the main color of the musical is red and black, I decided just to use those two colors. But later I found that the result is too monotonous, so I added more visual effects along with the red and black background from VIZZLE to make it look better. For the final video, the mode from 4MIXR helped me so much to change the visual style. When starting my final project, after twisting the piano roll sequencer and upload the music file in CELL, it will produce a changing pattern with dominant color schemes of red and black and the rhythm of the first part of the song.
The p fader that helps the color in PRIMR change only between red and black
The mode in 4MIXR I have chosen
What’s more, there were a few problems when I tried to build my patch.
Only with these overdrives on can I run my patch fluently
The SMOOTHR and DATASLIDR will slow down the signals
One of the most important components is the 3EASEMAPPR, which transfer my audio input into video output.
My gist: https://gist.github.com/Joyceyyzheng/e137b937b95d665e6968f0f8153451bb
(But it works only after you twist the sequence of the piano roll sequencer to 8 and put the song file into the CELL.)
The video of my project but unfortunately it only has the video part.
Presentation
The presentation generally went well. But the period of my video is pretty long, so it would be better if I can have extra time. The suggestion of making my video brighter is really helpful, but since the background of my video will change into red, it might not work that well due to the change of brightness. I also failed to play the melody of the original song, which made my project sounded worse.
Conclusion
Fortunately, I went to the theater and watch Le Rouge et Le Noir L’opéra Rock before writing the project documentation. In the movie, the song being played is just the one I chose, and this musical has been praised by its amazing “ppt” background for many times. We can see how the shape in red and black changes. The movie I uploaded is the encore part, while during the musical, shapes on the background even changed more, like the black hole expanding and shrinking in the burning flames. That shocked me a lot especially when I started to think about my project.
But I still learned a lot from doing the project. I knew how to create an audio or a video before, but not know how to create them at the same time. Though I failed to create the real background of the song, what I made could be another translation of the song. For some future improvements on the project, I would add more patterns and changes to the video that looks cooler. I will also work on the audio input to find a better way that allows my patch to play the melody I want.