katharsis impossible
siriusmo
THE PROJECT
Siriusmo, whose real name is Moritz FRIEDRICH, is a Berlin-based electronic music composer. It is distinguished by its fetish instrument, the Korg Trident, an analog synthesizer of 1980. This work proposes a parallelism between the principle of musical sample and a progressive visual loop.
This is our vision of an unofficial music video for Siriusmo’s Katharsis Impossible.
Produced, directed and animated by Thomas CHARIER & Benjamin RYLEWSKI
Audio: Siriusmo
facebook.com/siriusmo
soundcloud.com/siriusmo
Label: monkeytownrecords
~ 2015
enter the loop
Repetition is the basis of any musical work. The sample has become a standard in electronic music. This rule paces and governs the codes of the contemporary music video.
The measurements structure the piece and thus guide the frequency of appearance of the visuals that illustrate it. The beat per minute governs the musical discourse and thus the narrative discourse.
This notorious system is here exploited to its climax. This work proposes an absolute parallelism between the musical sample and the visual loop for the duration of a clip.
“the Plasterer of Love.”
Siriusmo and his album Mosaik, produced by the Monkeytown Records label, is one of his most famous pieces. His universe comes directly from Berlin techno. Siriusmo stands out in his original choice of rhythm and the extravagant tone of his instruments.
His unstructured melodies keep a balance over the albums. His music is often compared to that of Modeselektor, or Jan Driver, who are none other than the artists with whom he started.
Catharsis, Katharsis in German, means purification in Greek. The purification of the body and the spirit consists in freeing oneself of one's emotions as well as one's ambivalence.
Aristotle, defined this phenomenon as the corresponding action to cleanse, purify, purge. It has first of all the religious meaning of purification, and refers in particular to the ritual of expulsion practiced in Athens the day before the Thargelia.
The interpretation of the piece can be synthesized as an impossible quest of satisfaction. The concept translates into the use of a short loop that is incremented with obstacles and disruptive elements to the reading of the information.
The animation is in full synchronization with the song. It detaches itself during key moments to enter more into the narrative and to propose a visual intermission.
In this situation the staging of the environment and the actors is crucial. As well as the strategy of a loop narrative imposes a concise and repetitive scenario.
The storytelling remains simple but quite ambiguous. A dog falls into a trap and finds himself in a cage. He then falls in a loop in an infinite staircase of Chinese city blocks and finishes his trip to hell, litterally.
“madness!”
The action is centered on the cage and its comic repetition. The progressive accumulation of furniture over time remains subtle and is introduced as an aberration. The enigmatic scenario and the juxtaposition of the elements in the composition push the viewer to the point of mental rupture. The video clip challenges by its graphic audacity. The unique 3D composition and the sequence plan proclaim this work as experimental.
The originality of the clip is characterized by the use of a recurring element, a stop-motion animation, the use of modular compositions and staging by the absurd.
script
A dog stumbles repeatedly in a cellar. He ransacked the furniture to the rhythm of the first notes. The dog stops in front of the visible stairs. A cage falls from the ceiling and the trap. The cage falls in turn a staircase. The staircase is endless.
A cage containing the dog falls without stopping. The stairs go up in rhythm with the measure of the piece. The cage seems to fall and bounce on the spot. The wall of the staircase changes aesthetics as the staircase goes up. Many elements strew the stairs and come to decorate the descent.
The descent accelerates, the staircase goes up very fast. The cage hits a lucky statue and then falls one last time into a dark corner filled with Manekineko. The statuettes are evil and curse the dog. It turns into a washing machine. She emits a last breath before concluding the piece.
storyboard
The storyboard of this video clip is organized into three parts: the introduction, the loop and the ending.
The chaotic beginning of the piece allows the introduction of the environment & context in a fixed shot. The loop starts the camera movement and is divided into four sets. The outcome ends the song after a crescendo rise of the tempo.
technical breakdown
The production was confronted with the classic technical problems of a photo-realistic 3D animation with the only constraint of being a very long sequence shot.
Character design
At that time, in 2015, I wasn’t aware of the 3D character creation workflow so we didn’t benefit from digital sculpts and retopology. The character and all 3D assets presented here are the result of a classic 3D polygonal modeling. We were radically limited by basic shapes and Nurbs polygon flow.
3D environment art
Scene optimization was a considerable challenge to reduce rendering costs. The infinite staircase is too long to fully model it. Rendering instances did not present themselves as a viable solution to the changing nature of the environment.
The simplest solution was to cut the main loop into four separate blocks. They disappear from the scene and return to the beginning of the loop.
Texturing
PBR rendering imposed a rigorous workflow of modeling, UV unwrapping and texturing. We used Substance Painter to keep a consistent look across 3D assets and city blocks. It also allows us to preview and paint the 3D model in real-time even with huge polygon counts!
As our first big PBR project we didn’t cover the optimization techniques and game industry workflow. It saved us a lot of time to focus on the global look of the music video and the animation, but in the end, with a better scene optimisation we could have saved a lot of time when rendering and also could convert the whole project to real-time.
We used Arnold renderer for the rendering. It allowed us to load a crazy amount of polygons and subdivision surface without being limited by the hardware.
conclusion
Siriusmo's music video Katharsis Impossible is the end of a self-taught learning of 3D animation. The experimentation of 3D stop-motion in this work reaches new levels of control by exploiting to the maximum the tricks of the 3D workflow.
3D stop-motion is also known as claymation. It has become one of my favorite expressions thanks to its handcrafted approach and its surprising accuracy.
