After a few years of playing violin and piano music with composer Ninichi, we felt like there was something out there we were looking for to play that we could not find. Ambitiously we decided to solve this by coming up with it ourselves!
With Ninichi’s talent for melody and my interest in visual imagination and our combined enjoyment of storytelling through music we created a set of pieces called ‘The Light And The Dark’ alongside a narration which tells a fictional Fable that is a bit of a crossover between the surrealist gentle humour of something like Wallace and Grommet but more around a Middle Earth landscape and era!
This eventually then became the first collection for a broader idea of creating a series of these collections over time under the name of a sheet music shop: Ninichi and Xelafish. The overall concept being that this would be a website that would specialise in developing sheet music collections with imagination, context and storytelling with themes based from its own fantasy world. In many ways we would love to create the anticipation and excitement for instrumental sheet music when a collection drops from an evolving world for musicians in the same way as when the next series of a favourite TV series comes around. Hopefully it is something that those learning the instruments or playing recreationally can connect to in quite a thematic way allowing these collections to be a stepping stone to connecting to and finding the emotion and the story in more advanced repertoire. It’s been an enjoyable initiative so far and you can find more about this on the Ninichi and Xelafish website.
The central idea is it is a Sheet Music Shop in an alternate reality 1890 where magic is cast through music in the form of Melodic Enchantments. The founders are a version of Ninichi and I in this alternative reality and the shop is run by a Store Manager Zesper who has been able to communicate to 2019 via an Enchantment on a Typewriter that hooks it to a laptop!
You can see the shop appearance and Zesper’s communication to 2019 mechanism thanks to illustrations by our associate illustrator Plunderbadger:
It became clear early on that we did not want to drop this straight into the world cold and were keen to have a bit of it out there in some form to allow us continue to build it further, gauge reactions, and try and raise funds to cover the first runs of the printed books. This would also allow us to try and keep the supporting audio and visuals of the world as engaging and as high level as we could afford. So a crowdfunder was set up!
The piece we chose to be the launch track for it was ‘Journey Into The Unseen’ from ‘The Light And The Dark’. In the context of the Fable it occurs at a point where the world has been plunged into fog and finding a path through takes a good deal of caution. Though in terms of introducing the shop founders and how a collection about this ‘The Light And The Dark’ fable started off - we wanted to shoot a video that represented that aspect a little more.
Store Founders Ninichi and Xelafish heard rumours of this long lost fable being preserved in a book in its last known location in Obroazo Tower, Dalmatia…
Given we hoped to shoot sequences of the Fable book being found which willl be revealed when a full Ninichi and Xelafish webshop goes live at the end of 2020 - the challenge became where could we shoot a video (ideally somewhere closer than Croatia!) that could be Obroazo tower from this 1890 expedition to find the fable of The Light And The Dark.
We were very fortunate and are indebted to Peter Tompkins who very kindly let us record in St. Pancras Clocktower which offered a Baby Grand Piano for the music video and a really unusual exciting space that could easily represent this location.
Photo by Javier Martinez on Unsplash
The next stage became modelling how the space could be used for both music and montage sequences and certainly was one of the more unusual and most vertical spaces to experiment within. I use Capture visualisation software to mock-up locations sometimes. The advantage on a show run off a console is you can simulate and run cues in a visualiser as if they are in real time. It’s a good double check particularly on beam angles and for hitting set pieces the right way and avoiding catching other set that a particular light should avoid! The advantage on installation projects is you can import models direct from Sketchup which means even if there are some quite custom objects you can design them in this first and import them in.
With the help of Chris Atkins, Adrian Jeakins and Gabriela Garcia we were able to capture scenes within the space and replicate some of the angles and moods that would form the right basis for the final video:
A fascinating experience was adapting to the difference between a theatre style lighting and for film. Though with the help of feedback and ideas for adapting this to shots from Chris Atkins and the removal of some of my more dubious flickering LED practicals - we began to get there!
The final challenge was the post-production and looking to add more of a sense of magic and that the footage, scene and characters belong to a different reality. I was interested in finding a filter or an effect that could represent the 1890 world of N&X whenever it was used and gave almost a graphic novel style quality.
The tricky thing with anything like this or artist-style effects on video is every frame has to be rendered to track it through and can be very time-consuming!
Fortunately I came across a Transfusion plug-in for After Effects that offered a variety of options for this and was an ideal tool to form the basis of creating an ‘N&X’ look:
This created the following base look to all the footage:
The final stages were then to adjust the colour and glow balances and create mist, particle and light beam effects!
The plug-ins I used for these were all from Pixel Film Studios. They are not badly priced and there’s plenty on offer such as a Trackable Light Beam package which I used on the central lantern and coming up between the stairs in the overhead shots:
It was an eventful first experiment into lighting and filming a music video in a fictional location and a fun way to present a piece of Ninichi’s music and introduce this Sheet Music project out into the world. Huge thanks to Adrian, Chris, Gaby and Peter for the help on the day to bring Journey Into The Unseen to life!
Hope you enjoy the result!