Bonpapa Light Motif | STASH MAGAZINE

Frédéric Bonpapa “Light Motif”

London filmmaker/CG artist Frédéric Bonpapa anchors “Light Motif” on the rigorous architecture of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Section II, using procedural and key-framed animation to create an austere, mesmerizing and fully-CG short.

Frédéric Bonpapa: “The inspiration for the project stems from the relationship between music and the visual arts, illustrated by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren or John Whitney.

“Light Motif proposes applying the construction principles of Steve Reich’s compositions to visual language.

“Reich’s compositions are based on the repetition of short melodic patterns subjected to the gradual processes of dephasing, lengthening pattern, rhythmic saturation and tonal changes. The result of these subtle variations in the repetitions is a sound texture in constant transformation.

“Technically, the most challenging part of this project was the creation of a believable CG monkey. It’s fully animated by keyframe animation. I developed many tools in Softimage: muscle system, skin deformers, collision deformers, combination shape tools based on the FACS ( Facial Action Coding System ), hair grooming tools.

“I also developed many tools to procedurally generate abstract animations: ballistic projection system, advanced voxeliser. Mental Ray was used for the rendering and Nuke for the compositing.”

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