INFINITE ORBIT
Post-rock never tells you what it is about. There are no lyrics to explain anything, so the meaning is left entirely to whoever is listening, and it lands differently for every person. That openness is the point of the music, and it became the brief for this piece.
Post-rock never tells you what it is about. There are no lyrics to explain anything, so the meaning is left entirely to whoever is listening, and it lands differently for every person. That openness is the point of the music, and it became the brief for this piece.
Infinite Orbit is a tribute to Explosions In The Sky, made to mark twenty years of the band. It takes one track from the album The Wilderness and builds a visual answer to it, with one rule: don’t close the song down. Nothing literal, nothing narrative, nothing that hands the viewer a meaning. Only colour, form, and movement, abstract enough to leave the interpretation where it belongs.
Infinite Orbit is a tribute to Explosions In The Sky, made to mark twenty years of the band. It takes one track from the album The Wilderness and builds a visual answer to it, with one rule: don’t close the song down. Nothing literal, nothing narrative, nothing that hands the viewer a meaning. Only colour, form, and movement, abstract enough to leave the interpretation where it belongs.
The visual language was held to simple geometric shapes, because a shape can carry weight, tension, or calm without ever stating what it is. Colour and composition were kept restrained for the same reason, enough to set a mood but never enough to name one. The piece was built to read as one continuous journey of transformation, the same few forms shifting and giving way to the next, so the film moves the way the song does instead of illustrating it.
The visual language was held to simple geometric shapes, because a shape can carry weight, tension, or calm without ever stating what it is. Colour and composition were kept restrained for the same reason, enough to set a mood but never enough to name one. The piece was built to read as one continuous journey of transformation, the same few forms shifting and giving way to the next, so the film moves the way the song does instead of illustrating it.
If the music was going to lead, the first decision was to change it. The original runs 2:38, with stretches too slow to hold a screen, so the track was re-edited to fit the piece rather than the visuals paced to fit the track. From there the sound drove the image directly. Shapes modelled in Cinema 4D were deformed by the edited audio, with scale and opacity keyed to the same track in After Effects, so the forms move with the music rather than alongside it.
If the music was going to lead, the first decision was to change it. The original runs 2:38, with stretches too slow to hold a screen, so the track was re-edited to fit the piece rather than the visuals paced to fit the track. From there the sound drove the image directly. Shapes modelled in Cinema 4D were deformed by the edited audio, with scale and opacity keyed to the same track in After Effects, so the forms move with the music rather than alongside it.
The finish resists polish for the same reason. A clean render reads as machine-made and resolved, which is the opposite of how this music works. Film grain, chromatic aberration, and pixel sorting rough the surface up and keep the piece imperfect and human.
The finish resists polish for the same reason. A clean render reads as machine-made and resolved, which is the opposite of how this music works. Film grain, chromatic aberration, and pixel sorting rough the surface up and keep the piece imperfect and human.
Twenty years of a band that never explained itself, answered with a film that doesn’t either.
Twenty years of a band that never explained itself, answered with a film that doesn’t either.
Credits
Year: 2020
Music: Explosions in the Sky
Concept, Design & Animation: Filipe Cordeiro