Alien Synth Machine at the End of the Tunnel (2007):

Run length: 1 minute, 28 seconds.

Summary: (Music Video) The viewer is taken down a long dark tunnel at the end of which lies an alien synth machine.

The making of Alien Synth Machine: As with Synth Skater, the images for this video were generated almost entirely in POVRay and then processed through Corel Photopaint, Paint Shop Pro/Animation Shop, and Quicktime Professional to create the animation. I broke the project into five segments to keep the number of frames and the file sizes down to a level where I could comfortably work with them. The task of merging the segments into one big chunk fell to Quicktime Professional (the versions of Animation Shop and Corel Photopaint that I use had a tendency to choke if I tried to load too much into them).

As with Synth Skater, I created the soundtrack in Cakewalk Sonar. This time, however, in addition to using the Dream Station synth I also employed the excellent Papelmedia GM 2006 sound library by Maz Sound Tools for the tradional instruments (timpani and strings) used during the opening credits and the early half of the video. Of course I used the Dream Station Synth for the alien synth machine itself, as well as some of the other sounds/effects along the way.

Knowing that I wanted to do some major choreography this time, I went with one frame equal to 5/100 of a second in the video (20 frames per second) so that I could set the soundtrack to 4/4 time and have the notes and frames sync up reasonably well (with 40 frames per 2 second measure, a half note is at 20 frames, quarter note at 10 frames, eighth note at 5). I had experimented briefly with 10 eighth notes per measure, as that would have synced up even better (having both video and music divisible by 10, rather than video by 10 and music by 4). The rhythm sounded wrong to me, however, so I went back to standard 4/4 time for the soundtrack.

Instead of exporting an uncompressed video/sound file from Sonar (as I had done with Synth Skater), I just exported the sound (to a wav file) and then used Quicktime Professional to combine the sound and video.

Note: The soundtrack is available in ogg and wma formats from the Free Downloads page of GoodChimes.com.

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