CLICK HERE to download a frame grab of the master composition (36 times the size of 1080p HD). Look at it. Just LOOK AT IT.

THE INSPIRATION
“Brain Games” was inspired by the Atari 2600 game of the same name. The original game produced an incomprehensible jumble of symbols and bleeps in an effort to test the player’s memory and concentration skills. In order to shape the concept of the game into the song, I drew upon my thoughts about the scientific method and its influence over peoples thought processes over the course of modern history. LYRICS ARE HERE.

CONCEPT
Shortly after purchasing a Nintendo DSi and downloading Flipnote Studio, I decided to use the handheld console to make a music video for my album “BITS.” I thought it would be fun to use video game hardware to make a music video for an album inspired by video games. Flipnote is extremely easy to use — fast, fun, accessible … and very limited! The limited scope of the application was the first hurdle I had to work around. How could I get this thing to produce an HD music video (more on that later)?

From the start, I knew that I didn’t want to concern myself with a plot or characters. I wanted to make something abstract and “stream of consciousness.” My previous video work has been very meticulously planned out, storyboarded, pre-visualized ect. I wanted the “Brain Games” music video to be random and chaotic; to clash with the subject matter of the song (categorization, empiricism and the slow grind of accumulating knowledge using the scientific method).

I did take a relatively scientific approach to laying out the movie. I wanted each scene to be 1920 x 1080 pixels and about 6 seconds long. Given the length of the song, this gave me roughly 36 scenes.
I made a master composition in After Effects that was 6 full HD frames wide by 6 full HD frames high and 6 seconds long. Essentially, the movie only had to be 6 seconds long (played back 36 times focusing on different parts of the master composition). The viewer would see a section close up (at 1920×1080) for about 6 seconds … and then another and another. The last shot would reveal the mechanics of the whole thing.

THE SETUP
The master composition ended up being 11520 x 6480 pixels. This was very taxing on my Lenovo S10 netbook and even quite difficult for my quad-core desktop to render. At first, I envisioned that the video would take place inside a huge head. This early version was on a 5 x 7 grid.

This just started to look gross to me, so I ended up coming up with different settings for each of the 36 scenes (desert, hills, cliff, ocean, cave …). I brought back the idea of the face by placing seven TVs across the landscape to represent two eyes, a nose and a mouth.

I knew that the creatures that inhabited the video would be letters and numbers. I started drawing them … slapping eyes, teeth, little bits of hair where every I could find on their “bodies”. I had no idea what they would be doing, or how they would interact in the movie. I would drop them into the master composition and imagine what would look good with a particular character … a hot dog, dart, beach ball????

In order to keep some consistency within the composition, I scaled objects in increments of 100%. The letter/number creatures are all scaled (low quality nearest neighbor) at 200% relative to a 1920 x 1080 frame. Smaller things like the dart are at 100%. Using any high quality scaling caused all the beautiful jaggies to disappear.

In the end, my master composition in After Effects had 616 layers.

DOGMA?
I decided early on that all objects and characters would be drawn in Flipnote. Some objects run at 12fps, others at 24fps. All of them are looping animated gifs exported directly from Flipnote via the SD card on my DSi.

Here is a gallery of almost every image I created for use in this video:

Once I had established what would happen in a certain scene, I re-animated each character hopping, running or sliding around using the puppet tool in After Effects. This was often very labor intensive, frame by frame, slight nudging of pixels until the little creatures started to look even more alive. There is also a slight amount of drop shadow added to most of the characters and objects to make them pop off of the white page.

The video itself seemed to be missing an element so I decided to shoot some traditional footage of myself (using a Canon T2i) and down sample it to match the Flipnote material. I interjected this footage into the TVs to connect the music and video on a very literal level. The clips were too short on the little TVs (about 2 seconds per clip) so I added some full screen shots give the viewers a longer look.

It was never my intention to create the video entirely inside the DSi and only export it as a 256×192 Flipnote. If that were the case, I would have to import the audio by playing the song on my stereo, holding the DSi up to the speaker, and importing very low quality mono sound. The video would have been released in pieces … as an animated .gif! Sorry … no way.

My guiding principle was to use Flipnote, and have fun. I wanted to see what I could do with the DSi as the platform, but not limit myself to short, animated gif output it created. I worked while on the bus, on my lunch breaks, at midnight … whenever and wherever. The portability of the DSi/Flipnote was awesome.

OUTPUT
The original composition took about 10 hours for my computer to render down to 1920 x 1080 @ 24fps. OUCH!

I would love to see the main 6 second composition project at full resolution someday. That would be insane. I have uploaded “Brain Games” to youtube and vimeo. Strangely enough, youtube’s compression deals with the peculiarities of the video much better than vimeo’s. Unfortunately, neither of them are capable of showing the true pixelated goodness of the live action shots of me playing along with the songs. :(
It gets a little blurry and fuzzy even at 1080p.

This whole thing took me around nine months to put together. I’m happy to be finished. I think I’ll make a live action video next ;).

The “Brain Games” music video is finished! Months of doodling on my Nintendo DSi have come to an end and now I have one more music video for my album “BITS”.

What started as a vague idea on a flight to Barcelona has turned into a surreal, pixelated and abstract expression of what goes on inside my head … very unscripted and entirely without a plot (plenty of letters & numbers though).

ENJOY!

I was primarily inspired by two of my favorite short animated films:

Here are are the quick test animations I did while on the flight (animated gifs exported directly from Flipnote Studio):

Yet another food item from the animated GIF laden music video for the song “Brain Games” from the album “Bits”.

I’m drawing all types of objects for this little movie and I’m currently on a junk food kick. Most of the items that I’m drawing on the DSi are between 6-24 frames long. I’m smooshing the whole thing together in After Effects in one ENORMOUS composition (36 times the size 1080 HD).

My work flow is as follows:

1) animate object on my DSi
2) export object as an animated GIF
3) import object into AE and drop it into the “landscape”
4) print out (on paper) the current landscape
5) think about an object that the “landscape” is missing
6) go to step one

The movie currently contains 218 different animated GIFS; all looped, repeated, pasted, flipped, flying, twisting and dancing around. I probably have another 50 or so to go.

There are a few hurdles I’ve had to overcome in using the DSi to achieve the results I want for the film. I’ll go over them later as I go into more detail on the project itself.

UNTIL THEN …

enjoy the pizza.

A slice of cake … animated for the forthcoming “Brain Games” music video.

MMMMMmmmmmMMMmmMmMmmmm …

I’ve been working on TWO large projects on my little DSi.

1) The “Brain Games” music video
2) A new EP of 80s cover songs

The EP should be done in about a month. I’m sequencing all of the music using the Korg DS-10+ cart. It is super fun … and super LIMITED. In fact, you only have four notes (not including the drum tracks) available to you at any given time. I have pushed this thing to its limit and squeezed out six cover songs.

The songs range from repetitive/simple synth-pop, to more lavish 80s mega-arrangements that became increasingly popular as MIDI sequencers took hold. The user only has sixteen patterns available for a song when sequencing on the DS-10+. You run out of room REALLY FAST when putting anything remotely complex together. I worked around this by reusing the same patterns, and automating various part mutes to alter the instrumentation.

THANK GOD FOR PART MUTES.

I have been working on the “Brain Games” music video for several months now. I have drawn 100’s of animated .gifs on my DSi and I’m crunching them into one giant composition in AE. My Lenovo S10 is about to burst at the seams rendering 1080 HD frames that are 100s of layers deep. Why am I doing this on a netbook?

BRAIN GAMES

I don’t really have “plot” for this thing … it primarily consists of a bunch of letters and numbers running amuck around a bunch of TVs, mountains, cacti, ect.

The inspiration comes from two of my favorite animated films (which I will post here after I complete the movie).

I have quite a collection of notes from my days of studying physics. I was never quite sure why I kept them … UNTIL NOW!

I’ve been working on the music video for the song “Brain Games” for several months now. It is a combination of animated gifs exported from a Nintendo DSi, video altered in After Effects, and hand drawn animation.

The stacks and stacks of papers covered in equations are going to make their debut as “additional graphics” in the video! The entire video is basically one big animated mess … so I need to figure out just where these beasts go. I have some ideas though.

WOW — in my quest to find my old notes, I thought for a moment that I may have thrown them out in some post-physics-degree frenzy. I WAS WRONG!!!! I hit the mother load in the basement!

I believe I developed some kind of human/microfiche ability as I attempted to crush entire chapters of physics texts in 1/2 a notebook page.

OH YEAH …

… and don’t ask me why it is neon orange. I think I though it would help me concentrate.

OK … so it’s no big secret that I’ve started a band to play the album “Bits”. It seems like the most logical thing to do; people want to enjoy their rock music LOUD and in a dark club where they can consume food and drink.

Well, who am I to say that they are wrong?

The band, as of now, is still nameless. We’re floating along as Arman Bohn and the Bits Band and maybe that will stick. The Bits Band is Brad Kerr (bass), Gus Elg (keys) and Leb Borgerson (drums).

We are a month or two away from being ready to play live. I have a few ideas surfacing for some minimal on-stage video entertainment … but we’ll see. (My Commodore 64 monitor is on its last legs).

Blogger Andrew Klaus has posted a very kind and favorable review of “Bits” over on Diggin’ to China.

Check it out!