This is where I started working on the animation. I started with buiding a human like mesh (not perfect but good enough to make it clear what it is). I then linked the mesh to a biped (part 3). From there I could start moving the parts of the biped to animate the fairy. This took a very very very long time...

This was the basic story that I was hoping to fulfill by the end of the project (only in colour and 3D!).

This project all started with the serach for the perfect open-source musical piece to cover the 30 second project. At that stage I wasn't sure where the project was heading but I figured one I found something that I liked, a story would grow from the atmosphere the music would provide. I knew that if I found a techno song that I liked then I would have a fast paced animation with loads of quick movement, and if I came across a slow piano piece then the animation will also be slow.

I eventually came across a sond in an open-source archive called 'Kiss the Rain' composed by a pianist named Yiruma ( http://www.archive.org/details/Yiruma-KissTheRain ). It was one of those musical pieces that I could listen to multiple times (which I figured was going to happen anyway) and still be impressed by its beauty. I knew I was going to used this piece and have to make a beautiful animation (or as beautiful as possible; this is only my first time animating something) to compliment it.

From there it was deciding what exactly the music made me thing of. A few words came to mind, beauty being one of them, but I needed something tat would direct the story of the animation. I started thinking of things that were beautiful. From amongst the many of other things, the one that I thought would best suit a 30 second video was the idea of growth, the development of something simple into something complex and beautiful. The most obvious example of this to me was a cocoon, where a butterfly hatches and evolves into a butterfly. Although this would look pretty damn good, I can't see myself convincingly digitally animating either of those at this stage, let alone the growth stages in between, but I had the starting point for my story line.

It wasn't hard from there. I remember a project that I had worked on last year where I made fairies in a complicated flash prject where I used the weather conditions to determin their behaviour. So "how about I hatch a fairy?", I thought. And that's how it all began. It gets awful technical from there.

digital, surface, form and space

The concept that got me started on my Quartz Composer path was based on dancing. What I was hoping to do was create an audio visual patch which would allow the user to manipulate a character's movements. The individual movement would be plain and simple on its own, but, a lot like dancing, a combination of these simple movements create a complex and visually appealing new flow of motion.

Thinking about this further, I would like to offer a different view on how to think of dance. Dance is usually performed in response to music, particularly to a beat. In this project I wanted this trend to be reversed, and instead have the music play in response to movement. This way, only when the correct combination of movements are made will the beat create fluency and rhythm.

The process involved in the creation of this patch started with the recording of a friend in a plain space. The recording involved him making preforming simple single movements. This recording was imported into After Effects where he was removed from the background and the individual movements were rendered in single video files. In Quartz Composer these files were linked to buttons on the keyboard; one button for each movement. Linked to the same buttons were simple sounds. I was able to highlight my friend through a motion tracker, which was given color through a color generator. Videos were imported from Video Pong to be linked to the melody and bass sounds which were given the same motion and color treatment. The result was a colorful environment capable of visual and audible change.