TREATMENT:

TLE is an audio/visual experience which is 
realised completely using 3D animation only, 
with one objective being experimentation 
with using audio waveforms to manipulate the 
behaviour of characters, lighting and other 
parameters.

As the primary design approach, the musical 
track itself - its instruments, sophisticated 
rhythms, bass-lines, timbre (texture) and 
most importantly the actual audio waveforms 
themselves - became the basic building blocks 
of this abstract musical plot.

With the aid of a (then) recently developed 
audio-control methods coupled with traditional 
animation and modelling techniques, a mode of 
converting, or transposing sound to vision 
has been employed to achieve a rhythmic and 
unified composition.

Some 3D attributes that are audio driven:

¥ Camera - lense size or perspective, 
dolly position.

¥ Geometry - symmetric complexity, shape, 
scale, color level, animated texture, 
behaviour.

¥ Lighting - color intensity, fog noise level, 
animation, scale.

¥ Environmental fog - color, noise level, 
layer height.

¥ Paths - (for camera, geometry, lights, 
particles) shape, animation.

Using creative license, and a method developed 
to extract animation out of music, this palette 
of dynamic attributes were juxtaposed to 
generate a series of rhythmic visual 
(Tiny Little)engines, which provided an 
environmental repetition as sounds re-occur.

Interacting with this Orchestra of Shape and 
Color, the camera and the viewer are moved 
via undulating pathways of loops and vortices 
which pass through a continuous belt of 
colored fog as our journey unfolds.



RATIONALE:

By challenging the potential of animation in 
this hybrid form, TLE - by unifying parts of 
the music and visual creative process' - 
provides examples of a rhythmic symbiosis of 
stimuli that is expressed in a dynamic formula 
of linking and transposing of ideas or 
information of two different mediums in an 
mathematically and compositionally appealing 
way.



FINAL TRANSPOSITION: 

When the audio waveforms were not, or could 
not be driving 3D and atmospheric elements, 
a system of transposition developed especially 
for TLE was employed to animate these elements 
manually which allowed a seamless integration 
of audio and non-audio driven components.

Brief descriptions of the Final Transposition 
tracks are as follows, starting right to left 
- See Scroll image on far left:

11) The primary and multi-purpose ABC track 
contains visual reference to different 
instrument sounds and rhythms by use of 
alpha-numeric keys, each key representing a 
single music beat of 8 per line (Bar) with 
Bars of 2, 4, 8, 10, 12, or 16 representing 
scenes.

7+10) Final animation timings are displayed 
in the FPS and MIN-SEC tracks.

3+4) The look and feel of characters and 
sounds are shown in the FONETIX and VISUALIZE 
tracks.

5+9) The styles of character animation for 
each scene, using gestural strokes, are shown 
in the FREEFORM and loosely in the WAVE 
tracks.

8) Background color rhythms are shown in the 
XYZ track.

6) Background and character color schemes, 
which give an overall flow or feel are 
documented in the RGB-HSV track.

1+2)Scene numbers and names are shownin the 
first two tracks.

The Final Transposition is the basic 
foundation for the technique employed in 
realising TLE.

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

* DESIGN & ANIMATION;
Adem Jaffers
©1998

* PRODUCTION FACILITY;
Unreal Pictures
Inkind support :-)



* ONLINE FACILITY;
Icon Digital & Comcopy
  ONLINE OPERATOR;
Mike Swift

* MUSIC
  WRITTEN & PRODUCED BY;
The Visitors - Andrew Till,
Ollie Olsen & Geoffrey Hales

* PUBLISHED BY;
Psy-Music / PolyGram Music
Taken from the CD Psy-033
(Psy-Harmonics Volume 3)
"Hacking the Reality Myth"
©Psy-Harmonics
- Australia



* PRODUCTION STATISTICS;
3D software- 3dsMax
Grading- Digital Fusion
Disk Playback- DPS Perception
Network Render Engine- 966mhz
Render time per frame- 8:24sec
Animation Duration- 8:30sec
Total frmae #- 12,685fr
Database size- 5.2gig
Production duration- 22mnths
Hardware Platform- WinNTv4

* SPECIAL THANX TO;
David Nelson & the 
Unreal Pictures crew,
Psy-Harmincs crew,
James Murray & the 
Creative Access crew,
my mum, dad, Jeff jaffers 
Zenep Jaffers and 
Melanie Carr



Watch TLE on Vimeo..

Find various TLE press 
material on Flikr