The Ruffled Crow

Animation, Art, and Other Shiny Things

Last Moon – Kn1ght

An excellent find for a late night unscheduled music video, if I do say so myself.

This video screams the late 70’s to me: A soundtrack reminiscent of Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene album, and a vibrant neon gradient style of animation straight out of the pages of Heavy Metal Magazine.

Animated by Nicolas Pomet, the video makes excellent use of contrasting negative space and generalized detail and does it with incredible style.

Vivid Sydney 2016

Sydney Opera House’s presentation of Lighting the Sails: Songlines is an impressive display of projection mapping. Visual content and animation was done by Artists in Motion with music composed and designed by Rhoda Roberts and Damien Robinson.

Celebrating First Nations’ spirituality and culture through the songlines of our land and sky, this year’s Lighting the Sails is about painting and celebrating country through a pattern of sharing systems, interconnected history lines and trade routes. Lighting the Sails Director and Head of Indigenous Programming at Sydney Opera House Rhoda Roberts has selected six artists of different clans, national estates and territories for an immersive projected artwork that weaves through time and distance. [about the artists]

Lighting the Sails is currently being looped daily until June 13th and is part of the larger Vivid Sydney festival which is going on until June 18th. If I could handle the 18 hours flying from Seattle to Australia I would love to see this live and at a festival that sounds like a great mix of art, tech, and the combination of the two. (And I’d get to finally watch a Footy game live too. I’m an Adelaide (and Geelong) fan, for the record)

Here’s a link to a fantastic bit of projection mapping from the 2012 Vivid Sydney festival I posted a few years ago.

Ivan/Juan

Jimmy’s Gang – Parov Stelar

Moving Stone – Mattias Gordon

One of the nice things about long holiday weekends is that you don’t have to think – you can just kind of experience life as it goes by. Well, this video doesn’t give you a choice – you can’t think and you will experience it as it screams along. That’s not a bad thing but do hold on.

Animation by Mattias Gordon.

Music by Hazmat Modine.

Hazmat Modine describes itself as “blending elements of early Blues, Hokum Jugband, Swing, Klezmer, New Orleans R & B, and Jamaican Rocksteady” and I would say that this song hits every one of them on it’s meander.

And speaking of meander… This video does that too in an incredible stream-of-conciousness way. By the time I asked myself “What in the hell am I seeing?” I had already gotten absorbed by the blues-boppy tune.

Shoot Him Down by Alice Francis

Welcome to a long weekend with an Occasional Unscheduled Music Video (OUMV)! You’re gonna like this one.

 

A tune of mayhem from the album St James Ballroom.

Alice Francis, aka “Miss Flapperty”, was born in Romania and now lives in Cologne, Germany. While it sounds an awful lot like electro-swing, and has been remixed by the one-and-only Parov Stelar, Miss Francis prefers to call her style ‘Neo-Charleston’ due to her being influenced less by the current electro-swing artists and more by such greats as Django Reinhardt, Josephine Baker, and the unparalleled Miss Ella.

The Wanderer – The Animation Workshop

Song of the Knight – Steven Ray

You’re a valiant knight running about the countryside saving maidens and slaying dragons. Such valor earns you a magic, singing sword. So what if that singing sword won’t shut up? What if that damn sword has horrible taste in music? Does this end badly for you, or the sword?

By Steven Ray at the Ringling College of Art + Design via The CGBros.

Furious by Wicked City

Another occasional unscheduled weekend music video!

I’ve been diving my way into Glitch Hop music over the last week or so. It’s an interesting genre that gets bits from Glitch which uses sounds from malfunctioning or maladjusted digital technology, bugs, crashes, system errors, hardware noise, CD skipping, and digital distortion, Chiptunes that uses the tones embedded in old computer, game console, and arcade sound chips, and the heavy bass and funk from Hip Hop.

Unfortunately, like Punjabi music, animated videos are hard to find and this one may be a rarity. Oh there are plenty of tracks with animated sound visualizations and anime backgrounds, but this is the closest I can find to a music video and it appears to be a (very well done) splice of clips from several anime shows. If you know of anything out there, let me know in the comments.

Whatever the video, this tune has got some seriously mean funk bones to it. It funketh, verily.

Suzy by Caravan Palace