Final Fantasy Meets Nine Inch Nails
I did not direct this animation (obviously). These are CGI cut scenes from Final Fantasy VIII, set to a soundtrack of Fragile-era Nine Inch Nails. It was part of an experiment I did back in 2001 while studying film scoring techniques.
The whole thing runs about 45 minutes; weighing in at 2GB (DivX), it’s not download or video-share friendly. But this is a six minutes or so clip of my favorite section of the experiment.
Throughout the larger piece, there were some really amazing (and accidental) moments of musical serendipity as far as timing goes, a la Dark Side of the Rainbow. Those “lucky” alignments are strikingly common, even when throwing together random pieces of music and video. What I ended up taking away from the experiment was a reminder to sometimes not be so structured and deliberate in my approach to score, to leave room for these wonderful moments of accidental timing.
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Hmm, it seems the video is no longer available. Did YouTube yank it for copyright hullabaloo? I didn’t see a notice. It sounds like it would be a cool thing to check out.
I know what you mean about cool accidents like that. I was looking over a friend’s demo reel and caught this really cool cut where the first shot featured a woman blowing a bunch of dust off of a piece of paper and the second shot was from a music video where this guy flinched as a bunch of airborne dust, leaves, etc., blew past him. I mentioned the cut to my friend and he claimed that he wasn’t aware of it until I mentioned it to him. I think a lot of that may just be instinctual. I won’t think too much about where it comes from - I’m just glad that it’s there!
Comment by kradproductions — June 20, 2008 @ 9:07 pm
Remarkable. It’s almost as if the NIN song IS the music soundtrack for the piece. What a good soundtrack should do is enhance the emotional component of scenes and provide a mood. The film images are somewhat abstracted and epic, so the music centers it and makes it much easier to get sucked in to the scene.
This clip is inspiring. I love the role of chance in someone’s work. A beautiful example of it. I’d love to see the whole thing.
Comment by Ricky Grove — June 20, 2008 @ 9:24 pm
Well I’ll be damned, now it plays. Weird. Really enjoyed this! Loved how the fish-like creatures emerged with the line “the day the whole world went away.” I also liked how the line “there is a place that still remains” matched up with Earth being shown. Very cool. There is this phenomenon I’m starting to notice that I’m going to call the “Overman effect.” I’m kind of a visual person so I often think about what kind of imagery would fit with the songs I listen to. The “Overman effect” first happened with “Bodysnatchers.” I had my own idea of what would go with it and now every time I listen to it I see your video. Even when I listen to NIN’s original rendition of “Only” I can pick out the pieces you used and picture your video (okay, okay, yours AND Fincher’s - his was incredible too). The same with this. Ricky is right on with “It’s almost as if the NIN song IS the music soundtrack for the piece.” It syncs so good at points that it almost seems as if the song was built around the video instead of the other way around.
Comment by kradproductions — June 20, 2008 @ 9:49 pm
Thanks guys! Okay, here’s the REALLY weird part.
When I say accidental, I mean that quite literally. This video started as a simple attempt to try to get the cinematics out of a game I’d loved playing, in the days before Fraps made things like that so easy. So I found a user-made extraction tool, and used it to convert every single cinematic to video (because I couldn’t tell from looking at the filenames which ones were which). Then I watched them, found something a little interesting in them all, and decided I wanted to keep them and play with some music under them. So - get this - I stitched them together in precise sequential order (best I could tell) of the game’s story, and then just started trying different NIN instrumental tracks at different points.
NO video editing took place. No cuts, no crossfades. Everything in the video is the cutscenes from the game, one after the other in the order they were invoked, and I just layed musical tracks over different sections as it felt right. I had intended to do editing (thought I’d have to do so to make things fit), but the accidents of timing were so jarring that I didn’t touch a thing. And this is using mostly instrumental tracks from one artist over three or four different albums / EPs.
So I really truly mean accidental. I really feel about this piece as if it’s not something I made, but something which occurred and I happened to be there. That yields a strange enjoyment for this piece that’s totally different than what I feel about stuff I “directed”.
I’ll see if I can figure out a way to get the whole thing up somewhere. It’s a copyright nightmare, and I’d have never thrown it up even on YouTube if I hadn’t seen so many other FF vids already there unmolested. I really wish I could get the whole thing up on a high quality site like Vimeo, but it’s a tough video to subdivide because the music overlaps some of the video seams.
There are a couple shots in the full piece which served as backdrops to real-time action in the foreground, so that foreground motion is missing from the cinematics. I’ve been tempted to try to composite in some of those scenes to complete them, maybe I’ll do that before I put the big one out there if time permits.
Comment by Overman — June 20, 2008 @ 10:27 pm
That did synch up so well! weird! LOL I never saw that scene before but then again I never finished playing the game heh. Great song choice - kind of a relaxing piece to watch in a way.
Comment by crystalwitchery — June 21, 2008 @ 9:37 am
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