“Color Separated” is a new music video for Swedish electrofunk producer Beem, directed and animated by Sam Rolfes (profiled in ANIMAL’s Artist Notebook here). Click to play above, in all its gyrating, moshing, dayglo-horror glory.
“The vid was created over a month of tearing apart the gnarled 3D objects and environments that litter my hard drive from previous projects, rupturing and colliding their fat, chromatic clay bodies and pulling out mangled cluster-identities out of the resulting digital stew to populate the pigmented mountains of color I built around them,” Rolfes tells ANIMAL.
This is Rolfes’ first “proper” animated video. He explains, “I didn’t have any interest in slick, keyframed movement or anything even remotely resembling the unfeeling rotating objects favored by the current status quo of haute-digital art kids and street goth Turbosquid patrons; nearly everything in the vid was recorded live from my screen in HD as I swung around the hidden internal rigging of the characters with my tablet to make them stupidly groove around like polygon marionettes.”
The video plays as if erupting in little Big Bangs, an opposite of a black hole — a hole spurting out variously deformed, crazy-looking but very cheerful forms. It’s quite a nice contrast to the smooth electrofunk.
“The frame rate during the recording process was far lower than what it would resemble during playback,” the artist says. “So I had to time their silly bobs and bounces to about half the speed of the beat (which surprisingly worked pretty well when it came time to edit together the 50-odd performance clips that resulted). It seemed only rational to me that everything be performed semi-live and in as naively unhinged a manner as Beem’s joyously weird track.”
“In keeping with my current attempt at fleeing the demure, contrived irony of the popular art world, I simply wanted to construct a couple dance floors built of polysynth headspace for my figures to act out and manically loose themselves of the visually desolate cultural environment I feel asphyxiated by right now,” the artist concludes. “If I came off looking like a jackass in doing so, it’d at least be in the interest of making something funny.”
(Images Courtesy Sam Rolfes)
