Mon Ami Bleu

Working procedure

Music and video animation were created on the basis of a painting by Otto W. Liesch. The music describes the process of looking. The painting „resounds“ from various perspectives. The video animation explores the complexity of the painting and relates its colour and spatial qualities to the temporal and tonal complexity of the piece of music. In the course of the working process, Frölich and Thyes exchanged ideas on how to coordinate music and animation.

The music was written for symphony orchestra in the instrumentation 2222 2230 2perc., str. This instrumentation provides a great variety of sound colours and dynamic possibilities. The sound recording was made in the Philharmonie Hradec Králové (Czech Republic), a concert hall with a volume of about 9250 m3. The special feature of the recording was that each individual instrument of the symphony orchestra was recorded in stereo. This made it possible to plausibly represent the instruments in the sound mix largely independent of their place in the orchestra around the audience. The spatial sound in the mix does not come from the recording room, but is a product of the convolution reverb ‚Roomenizer‘ with the preset Amare concert hall in The Hague with a room volume of almost 20‘000 m3. The combination of natural sounding instruments and an impressive sounding concert hall thus creates a sound experience of the highest quality. 3D audio differs from other formats in terms of spatiality. Conventional surround sound spans an area with 5 speakers in one plane and is therefore two-dimensional. In true 3D audio, the loudspeakers represent the corners and, if there are more of them, edges of a virtual box. This means: It is possible to experience the surround sound of, for example, a church in your living room – this has never been done before! Our recording was mixed for 16 speakers.

The source materials for the animation were a professional photograph of the painting and a film sequence that recorded the painting with a video camera and moving light source in the sense of a „wandering gaze“. The photograph was edited in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to distribute the intricate painting strokes and structures of the painting over many individual layers. A mixture of 2D and 3D animation was created in Adobe After Effects (and Blender). The resulting video animation wanders – like an attentive, searching gaze – through the „jungle“ of shapes, exposing layers behind, bringing details to the front, and so on. The animation is available both as a normal HD video and as a stereoscopic 3D animation, whose virtual spatial depth comes into its own in the exhibition space. The audience, equipped with 3D glasses, thus sees parts of the video animation / painting step forward into the room.