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.)
A live performance projection mapping at St Gervais temple, Geneva, Switzerland. From Mapping Festival 2010.
By Yannick Jacquet and Thomas Vaquié.
I recently watched a deadmau5 concert. On Netflix, of course – as much as I’d like to attend a live show, my age and hair would make me stand out like a violin at a guitar festival. Besides, standing in the middle of a huge, jostling, crowd just isn’t a good time to me.
Anyways, what was notable, besides the most excellent tuneage, was the light show, or rather, the ‘projection mapping’. Basically, the idea is projecting video onto 3D objects such as buildings or stage sets.
While this is actually kind of an advertisement for a cellular phone, it’s an incredible, large scale, example of projection mapping.
Each of the 120 metre high building’s 800 windows were covered with vinyl as 16 powerful projectors, stationed 300 metres away on the other side of the river, beamed 3D images onto the structure.
Rendezvous is a two-man electro band out of the UK. You may remember them from their previous video posted here, The Murph, that reached number five on the British club charts.
Your Friday Night Rogue Video is one that I wish was much longer than it is.
Music by Nostalgia.
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.
Your Saturday Rogue Video is a classic from Daft Punk. This is one of those songs that as many times as I’ve listened to it I can still never get all the words in the right order.
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The Ruffled Crow 