Animation, Art, and Other Shiny Things
The Temple is the last track of The Mind’s Eye, a series of short 3D, computer animated films released in 1990 on VHS videotape. (yeah, almost 30 years ago) It loosely told the tale of Earth, from creation onward. I was completely enthralled with this video and wore out this section of tape a few times.
This track, the whole tape really, marks when I truly came to believe that 3D computer animation had finally matured past a nerdy diversion and into a mainstream entertainment medium. The animation was bleeding-edge for 1990, and the soundtrack was synced well and pretty good all on it’s own.
Sure you still needed top-of-the-line hardware, and probably had to write half your own software, and motion was still rather stiff, and hair?, never mind about hair. But it was getting easier, and cheaper, and more artists were flocking to the medium. The boundaries of worlds were being pushed rather than simply trying to replicate reality. To me, this was the official opening of a new frontier.
There were 3 more collections in The Mind’s Eye series, one released every two years until 1996; Beyond the Mind’s Eye, The Gate to the Mind’s Eye, and Odyssey Into the Mind’s Eye
(You may recognize the surroundings and birds from the second installment, Civilization Rising, (or 03 per the video itself) as the animation between about the 50 second mark to about 1’20” looks to be from just before this video.)
An excellent entry in the unscheduled weekend music video, uh, list of music videos that weren’t scheduled but everybody knows I’ll post one anyways list. Yeah, that list.
Celldweller is one of those artists that dominates my entire playlist for days at a time. I’ve only got four of Klayton‘s albums but the album this song comes from is my favorite. End of an Empire is a story album that tells of the fall of a far future civilization and the competition between factions as it tears itself apart. (At least as far as I can discern.)
His music in distinctly electro, but includes aspects of heavy glitch and DnB, as well as metal and even orchestral elements. Klayton puts together some complex soundscapes that lends itself well to story-telling.
Down to Earth is directed and animated by Michi Lange.
Your Friday night (occasional) rogue music video is a dubsteperous biological overview of a viral infection. A lethal viral infection. Featuring a beating heart, red blood cells (erythrocytes, to be precise), an offending virus, and it’s unidentified cellular victim zero, Blackburner shows us the screaming nightmare of every Biologist and Virologist on the planet.
A Goa trance track from Loud’s album No More X
Animation by Oron Aiche
Your Friday Occasional Rogue Video is a great example of Goa Trance, also known as Psytrance, and is one of the few animations in this genre that isn’t simply pattern morphing or visualization generated stuff.
The last installment in the Beyond the Mind’s Eye series.
Next series up would be the Odyssey Into the Mind’s Eye, and we will get to it eventually, but not just yet. There’s a lot of excellent animation out there now and I’m getting a bit of a backlog of great stuff in the draft queue that needs to be posted.
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The Ruffled Crow 