The Fearless & the Fabulous

#114 – The fearless & the fabulous (Static)

#114 – The fearless & the fabulous (Panimating)

The hour is past midnight, when reality turns nebulous.
I am walking down the metro, with early signs of sickness.
The how and the why? It’s really none of your business.
Price to pay to haunt this urban hive, warm and populous.

Grey corridors… wet pavement… the place feels airless.
Yesterday’s ideas and dreams? Asudden, they turn caducous.
Even the mere idea of hoping, now sounds blasphemous!
But then, through half-closed eyelids, I am the witness.

Shimmering colours caught from the corner of my eye… Zeus!
I play it cool at first, blatantly casual and careless.
The visual flow holds something raw, a form of bareness,
Instantly waking up in me the bereft and the ravenous.

I falter, head banging, heart pounding, limbs all calculous,
Reaching out to this radiant and compelling source of gladness.
For a tick lives the idea I can even exist: Me, the rebellious!
The surrender is quick though, to the settled, and the endless.

As my body hits the steel rails, and hangs there, motionless,
A storm in me grows, a riot, against something so fictitious.
A set up, when I feel so helpless … Isn’t that suspicious?
Really, I did not see that coming, in all truth and fairness!

It’s done … Breathe and acknowledge, what’s left of goodness.
In the end, wisdom takes over and leads the way, God bless!
The realisation is, there’s nothing more worthy and tremendous
Than this incredibly fearless and this absolutely fabulous … you!
–
Quad Damage

Techniques: Synesthesia, Unity3D, Cinema4D, Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator, FX Photo Studio Pro

A couple of weeks ago saw the 41st edition of Sydney Mardi Gras, on the main theme “Fearless and fabulous”. Like each year, I feel compelled to commit something rainbowy 🙂

It all started with a visualisation in Synesthesia, which I initially rendered on Vortex, a song from Franca. I just absolutely loved both the colour tones I got, this flashy association of green and purple, but also the Rorschach style shapes the beat generated, which proved of an incredible diversity. For instance … and that’s just in out of first 14 seconds of the clip, so be my guest to hallucinate for 6 more minutes!

This is the whole raw animation

With such rich material, I could have stopped there, just rendered the whole clip, and captured the best snapshot out of it. But choosing is excluding, and that was clearly too hard. So I pushed myself to make it more a psychedelic animated texture I could inject in some sort of 3D setting, using Unity.

Rather than something totally abstract, I wanted it to relate to the Sydney Parade, to the atmosphere of the party, late in the night, when rainbow angels get tired … their make up gets flaky … and they shed glitters in their steps, as they try to find their way back to Heaven.

As it turns out, this is a winding path and many narrow doors, to get back to God’s house, and it often goes through hellish places, underground, deep in the guts of the city, dark, steamy and smelly. A subway setting sounded appropriate, and it prompted a couple of trains of thought … so to speak.

The first one led me to the Unity Store, to check if I could find a decent Subway environment. And I did! courtesy of Gabro Media. I just had to do a bit of customisation in Cinema4D and Unity3D to make it look more Australian.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/urban/urban-underground-64542

The second train I took was on the audio track, and it led me to the final soundtrack, borrowed to Mashina Vremeni, a Russian rock band which, in the early 2000’s, committed this absolutely amazing tune, translating in English “Stars do not take underground”, how appropriate.

Звезды не ездят в метро – Машина Времени

Pulling everything together was a game of application and patience in Unity3D, Cinema4D and Final Cut Pro. Quite happy I got this out. This exercise was also the occasion to play with 3 new Unity PlugIns I have recently acquired:

Aura 2, for volumetric lighting: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/particles-effects/aura-2-volumetric-lighting-fog-137148

Amplify Shader Editor: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/visual-scripting/amplify-shader-editor-68570

And Polybrush, a free utility from the Unity crew for vertex painting: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/polybrush-beta-111427

All tools I can only highly recommend to any 3D level artist.