Art Essay 3

http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDjjR_EX1Bk&feature=related


For this next art essay I wanted it to have to do with art in a video and I came across something very interesting on Youtube.com. There are a series of 2D animation videos that correlate with some songs by Radiohead, and the first one of the series is based off of the song "Trans-Atlantic Drawl." The animations themselves are (I believe purposely) mediocre, but the way the artist created the plotline to correspond perfectly to the music, it almost seems like the songs were made for these animations, not the other way around. These videos don't offer any dialogue, so the artist is responsible for creating a plotline that viewers are able to understand without the need of words to describe the events, which he does very well. The beginning of "Trans-Atlantic Drawl"starts off sounding very chaotic and almost has a siren-y sound to it which makes listeners feel somewhat uneasy or restless to begin with, which coincides well with what the character is going through. The artist starts this "episode" off with showing the main character (who is drawn with a face that seems permanently worried) in four different screens waking up at 7:00 and going through a quick montage of his burned out daily routine repeatedly, as the rhythm and music of the song suggests. In the middle of the song, it cuts to being a very solemn tune, slow and almost conveys a mood of death. During this time the artist decides to cut to a memory of losing the girl that the main character loves that seems to be haunting him throughout the first half of the song. The transition worked absolutely perfectly, and was very creative; as a viewer I had no idea what could have possibly connected the first half of the song to the second half, them being two completely different sounds. This form of art is very interesting to me because there are so many things that the artist needs to understand and capture in his or her animation. In this case, there aren't many words in "Trans-Atlantic Drawl" so viewers don't have to try to understand what the words of the song are and how they connect to the sound of the music as well as what the story of the animation is about. Also, the correlation of the music and the animation work almost dependently on one another, because if you just watch the video without the sound, you lose all of the effect the music has on what the animation is trying to convey. When you just listen to the song, your brain gets scrambled about the countless meanings it could have. I look forward to researching more on animations in vidoes that are choreographed with music because there are so many possibilities of what could be portrayed from them.