Skyy Low & SAI - 僕らの想像  (Our Imagination)

Type: Song, Video (Animation, Editing)

Genre: Electronic, Vocaloid

 

 

​A song I made with my friend way back in school, Inspired heavily by Porter Robinson's music and aesthetic.

 

The video is a heavily edited render of a silohuette of a man and a woman standing in some sort of a structure... The text edited to be hard to make out against the silohuette and only revealing itself when changing colors between white and black.

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Song Background:

This song came to be when I presented my friend, known as SAI in the credits, with a demo I created in Logic Pro to which he proceeded to produce a melody with the "Hatsune Miku" Vocaloid, a sort of virtual programmable voicebank for those unfamiliar. After this, SAI wrote lyrics detailing this person who feels a longing to be heard and understood in a lonely world, and suggests that by using music and creativity to create together, people can find hope and build a better world despite uncertainty. From then on I worked to create a final product, the finished version of the song.  Cut to a year or two later, I revisited the song not happy with how the mix came out, so I mixed it and mastered it better before releasing it in the form you see before you now.

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Video Background:

The concept of the video came to me upon looking at the artwork SAI made for the Soundcloud page of the original mix of the song. It was a white backdrop with various black strokes, like paint strokes, sort of arranged in a squarish pattern.  This inspired me to create album art (Or "single" art I guess in this case) of the silhouette of a man and a woman standing within a structure based on the song's concept made inside of the painting software, Krita. The art would feature the same black strokes against the white background to give the image this sort of faintness and translucency as the image would appear faint and faded. I then refined it to create a version two of the image where there is now a clearer silhouette of a man and a woman standing in a house. Following this, I had an idea to create a visualiser video to accompany the song and I put the layers into Adobe After Effects where I moved the images around to give it some dynamics. But more importantly, it is in After Effects that I used the 3D feature to give the 2D image a sense of depth and rotated the image in a few different angles. After this, most of the heavy lifting came in the editing. Believe it or not, the video was edited on Kinemaster, the editing software designed for Mobile Phones, I had played around with Kinemaster a lot when I was younger and use it to add all of the lyrics and effects, inverting the colors to create variation and amplifying the effect I was going for. To convey the concept of trying to be heard through the noise of the world, I made the text intentionally hard to read against the black and white silhouettes (White when the colors are inverted) and made them easier to read upon the switching of the colors between black and white. I find the black and white colors to be essential to the concept of the video as it shows how marrying the two to create grey allows both white and black text to be easily read thus conveying the idea of coming together and using our imagination to make the world a better place. I also reuploaded the music video in a lower resolution and lower framerate as suggested by SAI as it gave off this aesthetic like it was an old school videogame.

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​The video was fully produced and edit by me

Date Released: 9/04/2024