When we were working on the music video for Quantum Superposition, I was at one point given some 3D renders of the artist’s head and shoulders, and asked to do something interesting with them.
I took this as an opportunity to work in TouchDesigner, a node-based programming system for working with audio and visuals, one which I’ve used a little before but never extensively.
I started by rendering the 3D model as a point cloud, then applying noisy displacement to create a rippled effect across the skin. Finally, I tied the noise amplitude to the music so that the model distorts in time to the beat. The resulting effect is glitchy and a little mesmerizing (though the song deserves a lot of credit for that I suppose).
We didn’t end up using the effect much in the video - a shame, but it wouldn’t have cohered with the rest of the visuals so it was the right call. But the learning time with TouchDesigner was productive. The node-based system makes it a lot easier to get started with and make something compared with working in Java/Processing, which are much lower-level languages that can make even simple tasks feel laborious. But at the same time, I found it frustrating to try to create something very specific in TouchDesigner - this is partly down to me being new to it of course, but there’s also always a tradeoff when moving to a higher level language, some flexibility is inevitably lost.
