From Bleak To Beautiful: The American Dollar's 'Anything You Synthesize'

Thanks to NOTCOT's early morning tweet a couple of days ago, I've been made aware of a beautiful music video from Dutch studio Onesize for The American Dollar’s “Anything You Synthesize.” A time lapse video focusing on a changing landscape, from bleak to beautiful, for the band The American Dollar.

Unfortunately, in it's full size and glory, it's too large for me to post it here (at 75 megs, you'd lose patience waiting for the movie to download), so be sure to go see the whole, full sized beautiful piece here

some screen grabs for you:










As quoted from the production company, Onesize:

•After listening to the song over and over, we came to the conclusion that the track felt like “landscape-music” to us.
•Seasons, mountains, time-lapsed skies, day, night, drama, decay, cinematic, slow-paced, out of the ordinary… to name a few keywords.
•We finally decided to build a looping landscape that would decay during the track. Very simple, but never the less a challenge to us, because we'd simple never done such a thing before.
•A simple camera movement traveling from left to right during the song, and while it travels we see the landscape decaying from a beautiful fresh mountain-view-landscape into a dead, flat desert.
•Also, during this trip we would see all 4 seasons of one year go by, even day and night. So, it actually is a non-linear and a non-chronological time-lapse of a decaying landscape.
•We had split-up the track in 9 pieces, equally in length. Each piece is one loopable landscape, panning from left to right. Then we also cut the song into 4 seasons and in addition, to make it more complex for ourselves, we also needed 3 smooth transitions from day into a short night.
•After preparation we started the actual production. Because of the fact that this was a “personal” Onesize project, we had to work on this during our spare time and in between projects.
•The idea was to add some live action (in-camera) effects, like rain, snow, lens flares, dust, etc. but we ended up with a fully CG production.

Funny thing is, once they were just about done with the piece, they looked at it and decided it worked better in reverse, so now it begins as a decaying landscape that becomes a flourishing one. Either way, it kept me in rapt attention.

CREDITS:
Audio: The American Dollar
Director: Kasper Verweij
Design & Animation: Menno Fokma, Harm van Zon, Reinier Fleas, Heerko Groefsema, Kasper Verweij, Rogier Hendriks
Post: Rogier Hendriks
Production: Onesize

Watch it in it's full size here.