drawing The Art of Dying | the Gojira project

basic shapes of the outro to The Art of Dying

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on drawing the background shapes for the outro section of "The Art of Dying".

I like to call that section "segment 11". It begins at about 5:55 and consists of several bars that are repeated for nearly 4 minutes.

drawing Gojira's "The Art of Dying": designing the paper sculpture from Rebekah Paulovich-Boucly on Vimeo.

This segment of the drawing is almost 3 meters long. I'm working on a set of shapes that repeat themselves down this full length. Once the loops weave together in just the right way, I'll start filling them in with detailed line work and shading (similar to what I did here).

color proofs

The biggest challenges with the Gojira project have been technical issues, mainly dealing with scanning and printing the illustrations. I am planning to have 10 copies of the project printed and bound, as limited-edition artist books. The books are approx 90mm X 140mm, and contain 31 pages in an accordion-fold.

After quite a bit of searching, I was able to find a printer willing to take on this project, Les Arts Graphiques here in Nice. Megapom', a local photoengraver, will be scanning and treating the drawings. And finally, a local artist has agreed to hand-bind the books once they are printed and assembled. 

We did 6 tests, in quadrichromie and in bichromie. The best process appears to be quadrichromie with a layer of Pantone process black. This makes the outlines denser. Using quadri (instead of bichromie) also helps bring out the depth of the illustrations, by capturing the fine naunces of grey in the coloring.

What makes this project complicated is that the accordion-fold is very long (about 2.7 m). The accordion-fold will have to be printed out in 4 separate pieces, which I will then fold and assemble together. So we will really have to make sure the printing is even, and that there are no strong color variations between the different segments. 

The scanning process will take place in 2 steps: first, we'll scan the outlines, and then, after shading and texturing those outlines, I will have the full illustrations scanned a second time.

Then the 2 scans will be superimposed in Photoshop, which will help make the outlines very dense.

So I have quite a bit of work set out for me! I aim to have completed the outlines by the beginning of August, and begin working on the colors later during that month. Sometimes I wonder how many sets of copic liners and Tria markers I will need to finish this all!  

side project : drawing Excision & Datsik's Deviance

Surprise! I decided to draw a dubstep track! hehe. 

I responded to a media request from the UK Synesthesia Association, for a student who is putting together an ipad app about synesthetic experiences with electronic music. She sent me a number of very interesting tracks, and I chose to illustrate my synesthetic experience with Excision & Datsik's Deviance.

 

My illustration corresponds approximately to 0:26 - 0:50. 

I found those heavy sounds very thick and interesting. They resonate right at the back of my jaw, at the spot where my wisdom teeth once were. I get a similar reaction from the frequencies in songs like Megadeth's Holy Wars, Down's Bury me in Smoke, Pantera's Cowboys from Hell.

On first listens, these sounds almost looked like gruyère cheese - very dense and full of air bubbles. Then I listened more closely, and could see how the sound was actually very "hairy" and layered, nuanced. The rhythmns make it very flashy and cut-apart - kind of like watching a badly animated clip.

The sound is very blue / grey (I've actually found that much electronic music has a similar color palette for me, interestingly).

So I took textured paper, layered on color pencils, scratched away the color with an opened-up paperclip, layered on color again. Then I cut the paper into strips, rubbed the edges with sandpaper and glued them onto a piece of heavy paperboard, and sandpapered everything some more.

I really enjoyed this challenge, because I don't usually listen to music like this. All I can say is, it's all about the sound!

 

The art of dying > i won't bring no...

Over the past few weeks, I've drawing the first chorus sequence in the Art of Dying. This is one of the central sequence within the song, it's quite heavily textured and absolutely mind-blowing.

 

Here's my original outline of the sequence:

 

The next step was filling in the forground and background, giving texture to the outline.

 

And then I began shading, using Tria markers in 12 shades of gray, to bring out the depth. 

I realized that the lettering has to been done separately and then added in with Photoshop, because the letters are quite fine and really interfer with drawing the hairline textures in the loops - the letters make it difficult to draw the textures in one continuous movement.

You can hear this sequence - which I've labelled sequence #7 - from 4:16 - 4:45 in the video below. 

Mechanical heartbeat

The Gojira project is moving right along - I feel like the past few weeks have been a bit more productive! In any case, it sure is difficult to balance a huge personal project like this one with my full-time day job doing graphic design.

I've been working a lot lately on the 1st verse of The Art of Dying. I've been refering to this section as "sequence 4," which you can hear from 2:17 in the video at the end of this post.

It's been a challenge, especially developing the background loops.

For this sequence, I wanted the foreground loops to be a little less present, and make the background loops a more important part of the composition - reflecting the balance between vocals and accompaniment.

The condensed, sans serif is to emphasize the linearity of the vocals, not to directly spell out the vocal line. I used some overlapping in the composition along with some extended ascenders and descenders to suggest the vocal texture and rhythmn.

Gojira - The Art of Dying project: how a loop takes shape

When I'm drawing the different sequences in the the Gojira / The Art of Dying project, I use a lot of loops. I see the sound construction of the song as very circular.

During the drawing process, these loops go through many steps. The loop I've drawn here is a very small fill from the last sequence of the Art of Dying (minute 6:05).

Step 1: a basic, short-hand version of the loop.

Step 2: fleshing out the basic shapes of the loop and the thick thin contrast.  

Step 3: correcting the loop dynamics for rhythmn and movement.

 

And here is the finished loop-shape placed within the composition. 

Once I've finished drawing all the loops, I'll begin the coloring process. The entire composition will be against a black background, and the loops filled in with textured linework in blacks and greys, as in this example: 

 

Gojira - The Art of Dying project: how the paper sculpture works

Yesterday I posted several photos of the protoype paper sculpture structure for the Gojira-Art of Dying project. I put together this video to better explain how the paper sculpture works. It's a bit long (because the song is so long!). As the song plays, each corresponding loop of the paper sculpture is highlighted.

Gojira - The Art of Dying, paper sculpture from RPB on Vimeo.

First of all, I divided the song up into sequences according to how I visualize it. Each of these sequences works like a loop that circles around and around on itself, until you move onto the next loop. 

Now these sequences don't necessarily correspond to a proper musicological analysis of the song or even to the sections indicated in the sheet music. But that wasn't my intention either: I wanted to break the song down into the different sequences that I see synesthetically. 

One of the difficulties was working within the constraint of the 50-page moleskine format. This meant dividing up the sequences in a way that made sense, and also that worked out mathematically. 

The other constraint was developing a looping structure that functioned and that respected the layout of the different sequences. 

One of the really important points for me was to give enough importance to the chorus. These sequences are so powerful, and are really the central pivot within the song. 

I also decided to fill the entire reverse side of the japanese-fold album with one short sequence (sequence 11) that repeats itself over and over, in order to really emphasize the hypnotic quality of this passage. 

So once you've gone all the way to the end of the 50-page accordion fold, turned it over and came all the way back, you end up back at the beginning again. The entire project consists of loops, from its initial form, to the breakdown in sequences, to the drawing of each sequence - in which the sound itself is in loops... it all breaks down to the cycle of life and death. 

the art of dying: paper sculpture of the song structure

One of the primary ideas behind the Art of Dying project is that the booklet can be folded together into a paper sculpture through a system of short cuts in the paper folds. 

So you have the Moleskine-size notebook with 50 accordion-fold pages, which then loop over each other to show the structure of the song. Each loop corresponds to a sequence in the song, and the placement of the loop is determined by its relationship to other loops. 

 

This idea has proved to be quite complex to work out, and my first few prototypes didn't function properly - the pages kept tearing because the cut placement wasn't properly thought-out. But I've finally managed to get the cuts placed in the right spots, so that they work and are the least intrusive possible. 

And so I've finally put together a prototype that works. 

the wall of sound

I was recently talking about the Art of Dying project with some friends who don't listen to metal. When I played the song for them, they were almost taken aback by the wall of sound. The sound was so dense for them that they could hardly understand how I could "see" any shapes in the music. 

I started thinking a bit more about how the wall of sound can make extreme metal difficult to listen to and understand. Lack of obvious melodic lines, extremely dense rhythms, fast tempos, saturated vocals, loudness, minor/diminished /almost dissonant harmonies, distortion and reverberation all contribute to this effect. 

Now with my synesthesia, I often see this wall of sound as a sort of genetic imprint of a song - a sort of first level of perception. 

I see the contours of the song, shapes which are determined by the melodies and the dynamics. Colors tend to come from tones, harmonies and the general timbre (though the name of a song, prominent lyrics or even the CD track number can lend a tiny colored effect too). The rhythms and reverberation generally determine how much white, black and grey are present. 

This genetic imprint pretty much stays the same for any song I listen to. It is most often stronger than my auditory memory of the song. If I want to recall music from a certain album, I always picture its genetic imprint first - sometimes the music comes to mind right away, but sometimes all I can rememer is the shape and color of a song.

So, the wall of sound for the introduction (after the drum intro) to The Art of Dying looks roughly something like this :

 

For me, 2 things in particular distinguish Gojira's sound:
• highly resonant, warm, organic and bass-heavy sound - which I see as bands of grey, in varying thicknesses and shades.
• unusual rhythmic textures and polyrythmns - which I see as looping through and turning around each other. 

Their music is just so thick and highly textured, there is so much to take in. What I really enjoy is focusing on different dimensions of the music and letting the genetic imprint take on all sorts of complexities and details. this is what makes music really interesting for me... and what is fueling the whole project!

the art of dying : typeface research pt 2

For the Art of Dying project, I have been continuing to develop the type shapes for the chorus sequence. 

As with the verse sequences, I first worked with a generic type shapes : a medium-weight, condensed sans serif with no definitive style or character.

initial type work on the chorus sequence:

 

As I have mentioned previously, I realized that this project required much more specific type design to distinguish the 2 distinctive rhythmic styles used in Joseph Duplantier's vocal work in The Art of Dying.

The second of these styles is used in the chorus sequence, which you can listen to here:

The vocal work in the chorus of The Art of Dying is characterized by long notes held out over rapid drum rhythms are grounded in front of an extremely dense wall of sound. The high contrast between this slow, long melody and the extremely dense and fast musical background creates an effect of stasis. Time seems to stop and the melody just hangs in the air.

To illustrate this, I chose a bodoni-based alphabet to emphasis the thick-thin contrast. I rounded out letters like the "w" and chose to use certain lower-case letters like the "n" and the "a" to underline the drawn-out, smoothed melody. The sharp, this serifs represent the high, sharp drum beats.

The result is much denser, visually, and brings out the "propeller" effect of stasis: the music is moving so quickly that it completely slows down and you only hear the melody.

Once I begin working on coloring, the type will be in white, with the tunnel structure in shades of dark grey/black.

 

The Art of Dying : full project portfolio