Homes
AUDIOVISUAL PERFORMANCE
MADE WITH: Logic Pro, Procreate, Illustrator, Photoshop, Runway ML, Blender, Premiere, After Effects, TouchDesigner, Ableton Live, and DMX Lighting.
Homes (2023) is a concept album and multimedia performance about self-discovery, losing your sense of home, and struggling to build it again. The narrative of Homes follows a young person as they become an adult and undergo a series of personal transformations, as a means to investigate how our sense of “feeling at home” changes during crucial transitions in our lifetimes. As our character grows and changes, so does the style and medium in which the story is told. Each chapter is a different combination of music, film, animation, theater, poetry, reality, fantasy, and remix.
The first chapter, “Fell in Love in a Movie” is about falling in love for the first time. It is inspired by classic Hollywood filmmaking, My Bloody Valentine, and The 1975.
Show Control
For the performance of this song I used one projector, two screens, 9 DMX lights, a backing track, and live audio effects. In order to keep all of these outputs synced up, I controlled the entire show system from a single video file. I built a TouchDesigner network which crops into different areas of this video and outputs each component where it needs to go: The animations are sized correctly and sent to the displays, and the backing track is sent out to the mixer. In the middle of this show control I animated a rectangle of color for each DMX fixture, which TouchDesigner uses to control the stage lights in realtime as I play it back. I also made a rectangle which tells TouchDesigner to trigger vocal effects on my mic through Ableton Live. This system is really exciting to me because it allows me to program the entire show in After Effects, meaning I can use a tool I am very familiar with and switch between expression-based and keyframe animation quickly.
For future performances, I would like to experiment with different interactions between live elements and the prerecorded show control. For example, having the lighting in certain sections be driven by my microphone or having some layers of the animation be driven by my movement on stage.
Motion Tracking
For the first chorus, I wanted to capture the dreamy and handmade quality of campy sci-fi movies. I wanted the lyrics to subtly rise and fall with the vocal as if they were being puppeted by a string, like a miniature model. After playing around with the keyframe animation for a while I decided the better way to achieve that kind of motion was to simply capture it! I drew some dots on a piece of paper and taped this to a jaw harp holder I had nearby, and then performed the motion in front of my phone camera. I tracked these dots in After Effects and used that to drive the final animation.