Piano Tragic by Robin Van Rijn from Robin Van Rijn on Vimeo.
An animation by Robin Van Rijn. Music by Creeping Jaw Society. The track “Piano Tragic” is from the album “9 works for Piano” more information can be found at http://tisar.wordpress.com/
The animation is a meditation and reflection of the song.
This post is about a new film work. “Piano Tragic” is a track by Creeping Jaw Society. This is what creeping Jaw Society has to say about the track: “From the album Nine Works for Piano) Piano Tragic, which was the second track of the nine, was constructed using left over piano parts I had recorded five years previously at Luton 6th Form College, as well as single notes culled from a friends piano. The idea was to create a piece that had some emotion to it, but one built around the development of generative effects, and not just ‘a man playing a sad piano song’. I like to think it works…it at least turned out the way I heard it in my head.”
The track to me felt so composed, ordered, sequenced and filled with emotion but I could understand how it was quite self generative the way the notes and sound were so stretched and bunched together they took a life of there own forming patterns and fragments of a tune. I had wanted to do a video for music such as this for so long. My previous work with Canidae used so little precision and accuracy and was haphazardly edited with just a rough idea of how the piece structured together to form a loose narrative than typical screenplay or story-boarded animation.
With this piece I wanted to tie the sounds and editing to be precisely edited so that there was an entirely fluid, hypnotic and immersive in feeling and become completely engrossing in nature.
It was not until after 10 months of deliberating after making just 30 seconds of the animation before I found out this was the best way to go. I originally started this video in early 2009 and plotted out the animation until I got tangled around a trying to have a big idea. I felt the need to subject a theme and story into the animation to give a better cohesion between the visuals and music I was attempting to make and give the piece the same dramatic tension that that music has. Then I realised it would be pointless to give a piece such as this narrative and literal story as music of this type is far better left for the listener to interject his own ideas to the meaning and themes to the abstract nature of film and music.
Surrendering to my subconscious I just listened to the music with my eyes closed and worked out how the music could be represented visually as shapes and texture. The animation then only took a month to make and was a enjoyable and rewarding process. On that note I leave you with some still images. The full video will be uploaded soon.
