This is a pretentious title that alludes to nothing because I haven’t actually read Roland Barthes (though I did try to read “Mythologies” a few months ago but fell asleep, alas), but I swear to GOD that the PDF of that book is downloaded in one of my 300 tabs on Chrome and I definitely plan on reading him someday, ok??
Anyway. For my next assignment, I will be creating an animation timed to music. Well, timed makes it sound formulaic. It will be an animation created in tandem with music, a holy union, where one cannot exist without the other, lest the reality of art itself crumble into an existential heap of nonsense and treachery.
I spent several hours this weekend searching and searching and searching for the perfect song I could animate to. After doing some research (which I will post down below) I realized that music was most typically specifically composed for the explicit purpose of being animated to, either by the animator himself (it’s always “him,” UNTIL NOW) or by a close friend. I don’t really have any tools on hand to create music (though I’d certainly like to one day), and I’ve already exhausted all my music friend resources (they’re all tired of me asking them to MAKE MUSIC FOR ME RIGHT NOW because I’m going to make #SWEET ART), so I had to search Prelinger Archives for some tunes.
This search failed. I was exposed to a lot of different resources that I starred to my Favorites, but I will probably never use any of it. The recordings are too scratchy and muffled! They’re all blues! Or…they’re just bad!
Ultimately, I decided to dig through known favorites. This was initially difficult because though I listen to many different genres and know a lot of different bands (I’m really cool and knowledgeable), everything I listen to is sad. Yes, it’s all sad music. Chopin’s Nocturnes. Del Rey’s “Videogames.” Radiohead’s everything. It’s all sad(core). But I knew that for this animation, I wanted something exciting and textured and silly, because no one wants to watch a sad, abstract animation.
Eventually, I found a song by a new favorite artist, Jean-Jacques Perrey. Naturally, my favorite songs by him are his sad love songs, but he has an extensive experimental repertoire. I will be animating to his song “The Little Ships.”
audio visualizer: jean jacques-perrey’s “the little ships” from Marcie LaCerte on Vimeo.
Anyway. This is getting long-winded and aimless. Here are the animations that I will draw inspiration from this week:
A lot of fine art, including experimental animation, can feel inaccessible or boring, but music is a universal language that can open non-artists and animators to receiving fine art. And whereas fine art can have an obscured intent, ambiguous to viewers without knowledge or interest in context, music intrinsically contains an inexpressible clarity of emotion and intent—it transcends language and knowledge and burrows straight into the heart.
Visually, I really love how ecstatic and frenetic the animations are, and how they are so wonderfully colorful and textural and abstract. “cNote,” in particular, is especially beautiful to me. On some level, nearly everyone has some form of synesthesia, and these animations really fulfill that primal desire for objective representation of abstraction—and in this case, that is between music/color/form.
I think what 17-year-old Virginia Woolf once said about music really captures why these films are so effective, why this combination of abstraction and music resonates so well with so many people:
After all we are a world of imitations; all the Arts that is to say imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see. Such is the eternal instinct in the human beast, to try & reproduce something of that majesty in paint marble or ink. Somehow ink tonight seems to me the least effectual method of all — & music the nearest to truth.
experimental explorations 