Back to then.
In 2011, i’d recovered a drive full of old musical projects that i thought i’d never see again. The drive had been out of commission for over a year and it was sweet relief to have all my music back again. While i was poring over the contents, i found a half-finished album i’d started the previous decade but never completed.
I had become halfway decent at Blender thanks to watching pretty much everything CG Cookie put out. Inspired by the slow dancing astronomical objects in 2001: A Space Odyssey, i whipped up a completely procedural scene of a planet and starfield over nine days in April 2011.
What was relatively easy to choreograph and assemble turned out to be a pig to render – even at 720p (which i considered to be more “indie”) it took literally days to render all 8800 frames on four different computers. Even an old EeePC was put to work.
My “render garden” (not big enough to be a farm) rendered the frames direct to final PNGs – no multilayer OpenEXRs for tweaking the composite after the fact here, no sir.
I kept the video simple to evoke that good old Kubrickian sense of slow cosmological drift. Nearly two years later i still like it. It works. It fits.
I have a theory about where music will end up – people are only going to buy soundtracks from now on. Music’s continued success is as part of a larger offering.. because it’s got an awesome video, because it’s been used well in a video game or movie or TV show. Success on its own terms alone will get rarer.
My belief is that recorded music without some sort of extra context doesn’t really stand a chance anymore. That was my impetus to get good at Blender in the first place, so i could make videos for my audio. The irony there is that i haven’t written a note of music in months, and i don’t miss it. Animation and storytelling are much more fun.
Created between 6-15 April 2011. Buy the album on Bandcamp.
