Spectrogram (2019)
“The short version is we turned four movements of Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet into episodes of abstract animation. The long version is Ethan Shilling invented a plug-in to work within Autodesk Maya that took Berlioz’s music and transformed its every note and nuance into a series of instructions to drive the behaviours of all the animated elements on screen. We had tumbling obsidian blocks against a sullen red sky that tumbled exactly in time with Berlioz’s music; we had dancing swirls of light, a dizzying riot of golden balls, and a balletic spray of petals that danced on screen for a full fifteen minutes or so, and which always got a round of applause from concert goers for their sheer hypnotic loveliness.”
