My work is an extension of the never-ending thoughts I experience before I go to bed or whenever I walk home from school. These are the conversations and different scenarios that could have happened if I pursued a certain action. Some of them get ugly, while others create a world of butterflies and unicorns.
Most often a song gets stuck in my head that I would put it on repeat until I get tired of it. To accelerate this process of getting out of this so-called “Last Song Syndrome”, I would try to cover the song which would turn me off because I do not like the sound of my voice. Instead of simply recording myself, I decided to improve a previous project of mine which was a cartooned self-portrait. I found it very appropriate to use in the cover of song “Love Yourself” by Justin Bieber since the purpose of my blog is to feed my ego. The thought-process behind was simple, I would visualize audio in two ways. The first is a visual representation of the audio spectrum to act as the frame for my self-portrait. In layman’s term, it is a sound wave represented as lines so whenever a sound was made, a segment of the line would distort. The second part is the lip-syncing of my cartoon. In this process, I had to restructure my self-portrait in separate layers and label them based on their body parts. Next is figuring out how the mouth works whenever we talk. I was lucky to find a preset of mouth positions in Adobe Character (Preview), and in here, I learned that our vast vocabularies can be simplified into more or less than 13 different mouth openings. To translate my audio into this visual form, I had to use an uncompressed version of my vocals. During the recording, I separated the guitar track, percussion tracks and vocals so I could make adjustments on each one without hurting the others. Furthermore, I was able to import just the vocals for use in the Animation of my self-portrait. All I had to do was import the uncompressed vocals and my “puppet” self-portrait then Adobe Character (Preview) did the magic. I would admit that this would have been time-consuming if it was done frame by frames.
After listening to countless music online, I noticed that I enjoyed listening more when the background picture or logo is pulsing with the music. It sort of puts me in trance when watching the particles move in-sync with the song. I believe this is what I am trying to accomplish with this final project, to show the combined power of music and art.