The Embrace

[CSCorbridge]

So I've been working on and off a couple years on an artistic music video. All in AS11 and power director for editing/publishing. So here I've posted a sort of collage of snips of what I have so far because I feel like I'm never going to finish the thing. Thoughts, critiques, suggestions, and ideas to finish this thing very welcome.

[jahnocli]

It's the same feeling I get from most music videos; the visuals are eye candy for the soundtrack, and that makes them instantly forgettable. The film is a sequence of non sequiturs with a generic theme of alienation and suffering. Technically it looks well made, but I could never warm to animations like this as some form of artistic expression -- it's just too throwaway.
Ideas to finish it off? Well, what about a progression through the classic four elements -- air, fire, earth and water? You've got some aspects of these things already, and visiting the elements in this order could evoke creation and then return to our species' ultimate home in the oceans. Or something. Some kind of ordered progression underneath the chaos could serve you well, in my opinion. Hope this helps...

[CSCorbridge]

Well I asked for critique so I guess i certainly got what I asked for. I would suppose most music videos would be an artistic interpretation of a song... This just happens to be a resurrection of artwork I did in highschool 15 years ago I thought would be cool to animate now that animation has my interest...the song choice was more or less random, but chosen because I thought the mood of the song fit the mood of the artwork. Instead of the typical music-video being "eye candy for the soundtrack" as you put it, my intension for this is more ear-candy for the visual.

I was confused by non-sequitur...which means an invalid argument, so I fail to see your point...but I'll take a follow-up clarification if you think it would be helpful to me in finishing this.

More than anything else it was an exercise in using there software to manipulate image files rather than using vector layers...which in the end may prove to be a waste of time as Moho 12 seems to have really made that process much easier from what I understand.

[synthsin75]

I was confused by non-sequitur...

Non-sequitur just means that one thing does not seem to follow from another. It's not clear how any scene connects to any other to form a narrative. But considering music videos (especially for this genre of music) tend to be very impressionistic, rather than linear storytelling, I kind of expect that. Although I do think it weakens the overall impact, unless the visuals are overwhelmingly outstanding.

[CSCorbridge]

I see what you're saying. I didn't have a away to transition the scenes into a flowing storyline because there was no intended storyline to begin with, just a hodgepodge of drawings. The growing tree was it's own separate project and connecting that to the weirdo who drops his own heart on the ground was the best I could come up with for any kind of coherent connection. From the very beginning I anticipated the disjointed randomness of the images and characters would somewhat detract from the overall project at best, or be overly distractingly and painfully bewildering at worst. I was in fact relying on the hope the viewer would offer it some grace, viewing it with the perspective of its intentional surrealism. I appeal to surrealism as a style to justify my lack of any plot or progression of any coherent thoughts or themes