The American Astronaut is a 2001 space/western noir musical, written, directed by, and starring Cory McAbee. It’s a roller-coaster of a movie – intricate production design and campy dance sequences over a stark monochromatic backdrop of space bars, thieves, and asteroids. The 10-year anniversary of the film was fast approaching, and I was lucky to work with the McAbee camp on designing and implementing a commemorative online experience. The site launched April 7, 2010 at http://www.corymcabee.com/americanastronaut/. Here’s the story of how the piece came together.
We started from a base functional description, analyzing the key objectives they wanted to relate about their content. We formed those objectives into a outline structure for the site, and further fleshed out that sitemap into a more developed document that described the content that would go on each page.
- /americanastronaut/ – AA Home
- /americanastronaut/about/ – Credits, Synopsis
- /americanastronaut/press/ – contains press clippings, awards/festivals
- /americanastronaut/media/ – Trailer/Soundtrack/Images, other multimedia items (test footage, storyboard with audio)
- /americanastronaut/sceenings/ – area where users can get information about how and where to watch the movie – festivals, etc. This is where the lightmap goes
- /americanastronaut/images/ section (for same reason as press).
Note that these documents weren’t set in stone. I like to keep sitemaps and other roadmap-style documents consistently at about 90% completion until the end of a project. You never know what interesting places you’ll get to in the course of doing the actual work (and you don’t want to structurally block yourself out of any of it).
With the base content description done, we shifted to a design perspective. Fortunately for me, the group had resources, both in personnel and assets. The McAbee camp had recently unearthed a trove of previously unseen production materials – continuity polaroids, old props, and sketches for elements used in the production – these elements gave me a rich toolkit to design and develop from. We did a comprehensive analysis of their films and looked at other websites representing similar material. It became clear towards the beginning of the project that the end result would be a hybrid of HTML and Flash technology. The straight HTML was ideally suited for relaying textual information in a search engine-friendly format. Flash had the flexibility and the firepower to allow dynamic interfaces to be built that showcased their rich video, audio, and graphic assets.
I started with the Flash animation to get a general feel of their design aesthetic. It’s a lovingly handmade, economical film, and unsurprisingly their visions for the movie’s web presence were similar. The palette was almost exclusively black and white, with the layout being not minimalist, but extremely intentional. There were no extraneous elements – everything had its place and had to be thematically justified. I worked closely with the film’s production manager Becky Glupczynski to determine the ideal organization of the Flash content. We wanted to create something that enhanced the experience by not merely dumbly replicating the HTML content in Flash. We achieved this by mirroring the film’s narrative in the primary navigation of the Flash piece. Users are presented with a scrollable map of the American Astronaut solar system with other major locations in the movie (the Space Barn, Professor Hess’s ship) included. Clicking on different locations takes users to a specific page for that element, where they can explore video, images, and specially recorded voiceover narratives from Cory McAbee. It refelcted the narrative of the main movie, effectively presented the extra material, and supported the work of the straight HTML designs.
With the Flash completed, we moved to the HTML designs. The workflow for straight HTML design is a little more straightforward, so we were able to bat back and forth several rounds of wireframes and comps before settling on the general layout for each page. It took about three days to code and implement the site, and with a day of testing at the end, we successfully launched on April 7, 2010.
Lessons Learned
- During execution you save double the amount of time you spent planning. Had we not had the roadmap at the beginning, we would have wasted a lot of time. If anything, I want to modify my design workflow to have more wireframing and prototyping before the design and implementation stages. It does take time though – I was fortunate that the McAbee folks are consummate artists themselves, and grasped the strategic importance of the exercise.
- Be consistent. Aside from being generally stellar people, one of the reasons I think this project went so well is that we’ve got similar aesthetic drivers. I’m not a huge fan of excess in my own art – staying true to the ideal of economy created an experience that was externally cohesive and internally consistent.
- Write robust code from the beginning. It’s tempting to write ‘looser’ code for the purposes of temporary illustration or prototyping, and rely on the extra time you’ve got during the final execution to clean up the messy edges. Unfortunatley that extra time often fails to materialize. So write good code from the beginning – in the end it saves you time because it’s easier to edit, and previously written elements can be more easily reused.
I’ve recently become fascinated with the work of Ernst Haeckel, a German artist/biologist active around the turn of the century. His book ‘Kunstformen der Natur’ (German for ‘Art Forms of Nature’) contains a series of 100 lithographs, each arranging groups of disparate species into striking, unified compositions. Each plate is laid out as a collage, freeing the animals from their natural contexts – absent this constraint, the natural symmetries between different types of animals is astoundingly revealed.
The drawings are unquestionably beautiful, but more interesting are their philosophical underpinnings, and the application of those modes of thinking to our daily practice as digital artists.
From Olaf Breidbach’s preface of Prestel’s recent repackaging of Art Forms of Nature:
“In this profusion of symmetrical series, which seem to stem from the workshop of a brilliant designer, a fundamental formula for living things shines through for Haeckel. The many forms brought together in his work appeared to him to be a series of variations of simple constellations of symmetry. His depictions of them embrace a succession of complexities in which he saw the mechanics of evolution at work. His ‘Art Forms in Nature’ seeks to reproduce such constructions. Every plate in this work is an example of Haeckel’s notion of a principal unity of all living things. Each one of these illustrations – which for the uninitiated observer are at first only highly ornamental – was, for Haeckel, proof of his thesis. For him, the individual form, its inherent symmetry, documented Darwin’s notion of the evolutionary development of all living things..”
Catch that? Form is a documentation of evolution? It was an effective blending of science and nature, and his public ate it up. So what does it have to do with you?
Haeckel worked in the time of Art Nouveau and the birth of Darwinism – two ideological systems linked by their blurring of natural form and structure. As opposed to the theological perspective that living things came into existence in unchanging form due to divine will, the Darwinian perspective saw man as merely the current iteration of nature’s development. This line of thinking brought man much closer to nature – art nouveau synthesized this philosophy into an art of organic naturalism, realized in the decorative work of Gustav Klimt and the sculptural architecture of Gaudi, to name just a few. With these philosophies, the gulf between art and science became not only navigable, but irrelevant – art and science were merely opposing sides of the same coin.
If you’re a digital artist, there’s a similar philosophical chasm that has to be reconciled. Art is the expression of creativity, and creativity is a fuzzy, impossible-to-quantify thing. It would follow that, if the 1’s and 0’s realm of digital art is binary (and the context of art must mirror its content), digital media is unsuitable for rendering naturalism (the argument doesn’t really hold up as a snap your fingers, the art world changes-type thing, but for describing the way incremental technological changes have affected art, it’ll do). This is what we see in many forms of art today. The use of auto-tune in music gives the majority of our pop an artificial perfection. Video games tend towards increasingly stylized characters. We drive boxy cars down precisely aligned grids of roads. These forms of design mirror their digital production mechanisms, standing unified in opposition to naturalism.
But just as Haeckel saw the divide between science and nature irrelevant, so do I posit is the divide between naturalism and modernism in digital media. It’s a false choice – the more interesting places of artistic exploration are where digital/scientific/functional techniques and analog/naturalistic/formal patterns – merge and push each other forward. Examples?
- Frank Gehry, through the use of the program CATIA, construct the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as less structure and more sculpture.
- Some of the textures in Dan Deacon’s Bromst album are generated by connecting a MIDI output to a player piano, allowing the piano to play lines that are physically impossible for a human. (There’s an awesome video of this here).
- Robert Lazzarini’s Skulls series uses digital technology in hyperrealist sculptures of typical objects, skewed out of proportion. Looking at them almost makes you dizzy. (fascinating article about Lazzarini’s process here)
Each of these pieces leverage the best aspects of digital and analog technology – digital control and scalability, with organic feel and connection to history. I’m eager to explore these ideas more in my future sound and design work. Thoughts? Examples? Counter-examples? Holler in the comments.
I’ve been looking at the new Shearwater limited edition package (elements of which are depicted above) for their forthcoming record, and it got me thinking – what’s better than making money off of selling music? Making more money off selling music.
It’s no surprise that deluxe packages are big business in music. Take a look at Trent Reznor’s numbers for his Ghosts I-IV release in 2008 – in the first week the album made $1.6 million off of 781,917 transactions using a tiered release model. At the high end of his pyramid was the deluxe package which, at $300 for a limited edition of 2500, sold out within a day. Do the math. Deluxe packages make good financial sense (we discussed this before).
Here’s the rub though – after the fanboys/girls have parted with their $300, what are they left with? In the case of Nine Inch Nails, a photo book and some beautiful Giclee prints – in the case of the Flaming Lips, ‘a popcorn box with “real Flaming Lips popcorn stuffed inside of it,” an “Eat Your Own Spaceship” bumper sticker, a replica of the tickets from the screenings of the film earlier this year, trading cards of the band’s members, and a t-shirt.’
What are your audience left with when they buy deluxe packages? At best, a book they’ll occasionally refer to. At worst, a bunch of useless shit that will be admired briefly for novelty value, then consigned to a deep, dark section of their closet. As the people that are buying these are most likely the artist’s best off and most loyal acolytes, the opportunity to more effectively proselytize to them is huge, and in most cases missed.
A few questions to ask yourself when designing bonus materials
Does it enhance the brand? – This is a no-brainer – the bonus material should legitimately improve the experience of consuming the featured content. If it doesn’t enhance the experience of the content, it should enhance the strength of the brand – bumper stickers, etc. are fair game if they’re beautiful.
Will it last? – Artistically – is the piece a worthy thing of art in its own right, enough so that it people will save it? Is it something you would look at more than once? Physically – is it sturdily constructed? Is it beautiful?
Is it fun? – Just because something is functional doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.
Is the experience cohesive – While the bonus material has to stand on its own, it should be cut from the same cloth as the content it’s ‘improving’. You should embrace a single experience.
Pulling the onion back one level deeper, the best kind of bonus content is interactive content.
Mastodon included a score in the release of their album ‘Crack the Skye’.
A bonus package could include a picture book that has time indications where pages correspond with different sections of music.
A bonus package could grant you access to an online community where you can interact with the artist.
Make your stuff useful.
Make your stuff beautiful.
Make your stuff last.
I’ve done a lot of websites for bands, but no release has been as exciting as this. Hyperbole you say? I think not. The reason this release is so exciting is that the echobloom.com has now moved to being completely Wordpress-powered. Here’s what that means and how it happened.
For the non web-developer people out there – websites usually aren’t a series of static HTML pages. Most websites run on platforms CMSs (Content Management Systems). The pages serve as windows to display content from the CMS in pre-formatted visualizations. This allows designers a lot more flexibility – if you want to edit a website, you can just change the offending element within the CMS without touching any of the HTML used to display it.
My website previously had been a series of flat HTML pages surfacing content. This worked for about 70% of the content, and a tacked-on blog provided an interesting way of displaying more current information. But as the site grew I found that as the site grew I found I was spending far more time updating the website than creating content. And if I wanted to make a design change, I had to constantly rearchitect the way data was getting into the pages (because none of it was dynamic). A systemic change clearly had to be made, or with each design iteration I would just end up with the same problem with different window dressing. So – I decided to embrace the Wordpress M.O. completely.
In the revised echobloom.com every page is an element of a customized Wordpress theme I wrote. All posts fit into one of five categories, which are the five dynamic categories in the header (the store is its own beast – some things are better left static). Each page also has a static component that showcases the most recent major piece of work in the category, and a dynamic component that lists the ten most recent posts in that category. This splits the difference between being able to focus on more important, static topics, but having dynamic content around it. I’m hoping it will be the best of both worlds.
A few resources were invaluable in completing the site:
1 – The first stop should always be the Wordpress Codex. Wordpress has a wonderful user community, and the tool is extremely well documented.
2 – Several useful posts are on Smashing Magazine.
But by far the best resource for me was…3 – Currently available themes. A *lot* of people use Wordpress and have hacked themes to serve their needs. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel – use (and attribute) the community. I worked off the default theme that comes with Wordpress. Picking that apart for a few days gave me a wonderful idea of how Wordpress is actually used.
So check out the site – let me know if anything pops up, and as always, stay tuned.
The description of Project Nevins can be found here – much more Daniel Nevins at DanielNevins.com.
The average computer audio player (e.g. iTunes, Real Player, etc.) is the digital equivalent of a Walkman. Given the possibilities inherent in operating on powerful web-ready computers, these programs are oddly content to parrot only the basest functionality of analog technology. They are, as McLuhan would note, the media of the new doing the work of the old.
Music is an inherently social pursuit – we experience concerts together, find out about new music from friends, and discuss specific parts of songs with people while they’re playing. Web 2.0 technology is perfect to enable this type of social interaction with audio, but the that currently exist merely plunder the internet for commercial aims. I started Project Nevins with the charge of making an efficient Web 2.0 audio player. It’s now the leading edge of a system that will enable new ways of interacting with audio content:
Here are the system’s fundamental components:
Playspace – What I refer to as the playspace, or the section the playhead traverses as an audio file is played, has typically been a black hole of audio interface designs. With Project Nevins, the playspace becomes the palette for users to socially annotate audio files.
Comments – Comments are the circles that appear on the playspace. They come in two flavors – administrator comments are added by the creator of the content, and user comments can be added by anyone.
Contextual Menu – How many times have you blindly scrolled through an audio file looking for a specific section of material? Audio needs an inline table of contents – contextual menus are a start.
I see this system as having a few initial applications. Independent musicians could use the interface to directly communicate with their fans about their music, like an interactive track guide. Teachers could use the interface to point out specific sections of an audio piece, and students could respond (far easier than referencing a track by the time elapsed). Bands could trade arrangements back and forth, using the comments to talk about specific things they changed, or parts they feel need work.
I was assisted in this venture by the inordinately gifted Asheville painter Daniel Nevins, whose work might best fall into the ‘magical realist’ genre. The seed content for this interface comes from a radio piece I assembled after a series of interviews with Daniel earlier this year.
We looked at Edward Tufte’s first tome on data design, VDQI, a few months ago. In that first book, Mr. Tufte surveyed the best and worst of statistical graphics, arriving at a theory and best practices for data design. Fortunately for all of us, VDQI is just the tip of Tufte’s iceberg. I recently finished Tufte’s second work, Envisioning Information – a book about “pictures of nouns” (by Mr. Tufte’s reckoning, his first book was about pictures of numbers – his third book, Visual Explanations is about pictures of verbs).
Mr. Tufte spells out the book’s theme in its first sentence:
“The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensionl; the paper is static, flat. How are we to represent the rich visual world of experience and measurement on mere flatland?’
The book is a celebration of “escapes from flatland”. He divides the escapes thematically, providing instructional examples that are gradually synthesized into principles that can be applied by the reader. The themes:
- Micro/Macro Readings – to clarify, add data. The most complex datasets are sometimes best represented on aggregate (e.g. election maps)
- Layering and Separation – the space between 2 objects can create new objects (e.g. subjective contours)
- Small Multiples – combining multiple flatlands deepens displays (e.g. electoral college cartogram)
- Color and Information – the best use of color on data graphics is as a subtle highlight (e.g. ET’s Airport Signal People
- Narratives of Space and Time – e.g. dance diagrams
There are many parallels that can be drawn between data graphics and music. As much as multivariate data graphics are structured by the expanse of flatland, so is music organized by the trappings of linear time. Envisioning Information is about a more thoughtful response to these limits – and each of the book’s themes has an application to sound: the Micro/Macro Readings chapter brought to mind Curtis Roads’ survey of granular synthesis Microsound; the Layering and Separation chapter reminded me of the stratified arrangement of Bjork’s “All is Full of Love”. All media are, after all, specific representations of data.
More resources
So this isn’t the first time I’ve attempted some type of graphical notation. I had designs on this in my last project, and developed a type of compositional shorthand to represent different instrumentation ideas. I was into it partly for the theory, but most of my interest was out of necessity – my traditional scoring stunk and I needed some way of relaying my ideas to musicians. Here’s what my first attempt at graphical notation looked like:
[Here's a link to a high resolution image]
I printed the score out on a large (~20 feet) sheet of butcher paper and taped it to the dining room wall. Over the next few weeks I made additions and notations, and in the end arrived at something I felt accurately represented what I was hearing in my head. As a document of my compositional process, the score was a fantastic success. But that was also the score’s main problem – it had become an object that represented my process. Which was great for me, but I quickly found that my object ended up being a crappy tool for other performers. When I rolled out my opus for a group of musicians expecting something akin to a traditional score, they looked at me like I had a horn on my head. They got into it eventually, but it wasn’t the wild success I was hoping for.
So aside from it being more of an object and less of a tool, what went wrong? Two main things:
1 – It was completely non-representational. Without some type of traditional score component, people had nothing to grab onto.
2 – It wasn’t developed with the performers. It had been in my head so long it made perfect sense to me, but without a frame of reference, anybody else looking at it saw just a swarm of lines.
So how can we do better? I’m working on an example and hoped to have it ready by tomorrow, but I’m going to give it a little more time and try to get things working better. Stay tuned.
Now let’s look at some examples. First off, we should note that the idea of music as being typically represented on a five-line staff is a pretty Western generalization – several wildly different systems of notation developed independently in other countries. Russian hook and banner notation, Japanese Shakuhachi notation, and even music notation systems for Braille border on graphical and challenge our preconceptions about what a score is. But regardless of the graphicality of these international systems, they still fundamentally exist to present a piece of music as something definite and repeatable. Which isn’t what we’re concerned with.
What we’re concerned with is the addition of graphical elements to scores as suggestions for improvisation. This technique emerged in the early 1950’s from a group of composers who rejected the traditional score for requiring performers to submit to the will of the composer. In contrast, graphical notation fostered an active collaboration between the performer and the composer. Examples:
John Stead – Play II (for harpsichord and synthesizer)
Ryan Rapsys – Fantasy (for piano and electronic sounds)
Karlheinz Stockhausen – Helicopter String Quartet (for for string quartet, 4 helicopters with pilots and 4 sound technicians, 4 television transmitters, 4 x 3 sound transmitters, auditorium with 4 columns of televisions and 4 columns of loudspeakers, sound projectionist with mixing console/ moderator (ad lib.))
By my reckoning, after the initial experiments the field splintered and lost its focus. One side moved into an exploration of the boundary between a score and visual art (a typical example of this is George Crumb’s A Magic Circle of Infinity). Another went towards fluxus and event scores (a typical example of this is Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano).
Graphical notation shines when it is used as a tool for amplifying communication between the composer and the performer. It loses all of its power when it functions as an object or a performance art piece. So how can we do this? Tomorrow I’m going to talk about my flirtations with graphical notation in the past, and then I’ll show how it can be improved in the future.
More Resources
1 – BibliOdyssey has a fantastic piece on graphical scores
2 – The Block Museum on the campus of Northwestern had a good exhibit on graphical scores that is archived here
3 – More information on the Stockhausen Helicopter piece can be found on Stockhausen’s site
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the best ways to rehearse. I’m fortunate to be playing with a group of musicians whose technical skills are far superior to mine – so when I enter a situation, if I can adequately describe what I want to happen musically, this group of people can make it happen. But that’s the hitch. It’s one thing to have a clear picture in your head of how something sounds – it’s quite another to be able to accurately convey that to a group of musicians. Enter scoring.
Scoring exists to standardize music in a format other people can use. Non-ancient systems of scoring arose around the 9th century, when monks noticed their fellow brethren having difficulty remembering the melodies of Gregorian chants. At that point, scoring consisted of notations above the lyrics that sketched out melodic motion or phrasing. The system allowed for a good deal of complexity, but because it couldn’t express pitch or time, in the end it acted merely as a reminder for people who already knew the tune. A quantum leap was made in the 10th century when Guido d’Arezzo, an Italian Benedictine monk, introduced the concept of a four line staff, the precursor to the modern five line stave we use today.
But the staff notation commonly used today isn’t without its drawbacks. The system is rigid and leaves little room for creative interpretation. Also, while there are standardized mechanisms for representing pitch and rhythm, there is nothing for tonality. For a system of music notation to be truly useful (at least to me), it has to both accurately represent the things that can be accurately represented (like note duration and tempo), while at the same time leaving space for the things that are a little harder to define (like tone and structured improvisation).
That’s what we’re going to talk about this week. First we’re going to look at how other people have used systems of graphic notation, and then I’m going to share some of my past experiments. Finally, I’ll suggest a theory with an example for the Jamboree project.
Tune in tomorrow.
