AMEN BROTHER: COVER SLEEVE IDEA DEVELOPMENT

I wanted to try and incorporate the sleeves/covers of the songs I was using into the piece somehow. I have always loved the cover art of albums and the strong visual sense as well as also giving clues to the artists whose songs were playing that had sampled the Amen Beak I thought would be a nice touch. The question was how? I did not want them to be big on one of the screens and did not want to interfere with them stylistically too much.

I sourced all of the sleeves/covers from the songs I was using for my initial trials and played around with some sketches and loved the way that they could be tiled. It was from here I had a revelation and began experimenting with using them as sort of pixels to create blocky letters to spell out words. I planned how this might work on graph paper to scale using the HD screen size I would be working to. The obvious word seemed to be AMEN. As well as reflecting the Amen Break it came with lots of interesting connotations, meanings, symbolisms and ideology that I thought would add to the piece.

From this it was then a matter of deciding what to do with the letters. I thought photoshop would be the best way of doing some quick tests so got all of the sleeves/covers into photoshop and to the same size and then using the grids set about spelling out the word. I did 2 versions of this. The first was the word AMEN spelt out in the Winstons original cover for the song. the second was using all of the covers from the other songs. The eventual aim would be to use enough songs in the installation to spell the whole word AMEN. This would need 59 covers. However I then thought it would be good to have the word AMEN being built as the installation played the songs that artists cover would appear and add to the building of the word. To add to this as the Winston's track was part of the building blocks for each of these. I also wanted to intermittently go back to the Winston's after 9-10 tracks to reinforce this I thought I would try using these as the foundations or cornerstones (physically and conceptually) for the letters.

After I had built the words in photoshop I then exported then as lots of frames and used these to create the animations in Premiere Pro. An example of this is demonstrated below.

AMEN COVER ANIMATION DEMO from Jon Saward on Vimeo.

I do like the concept behind the animated versions using the song covers. I really want the piece to have an enigma quality about it ands feel that the use of the record covers/sleeves to gradually spell out the word AMEN from which the drum elements of each of them is built is really an interesting idea. It also adds a narrative element to the piece and hopefully if audiences see the covers spelling out something they may stay to find out what. The AMEN using the Winston's covers is a little more brash however and I am less sure of it as it acts as a bit of a screamer. Visually I am not a 100% convinced. It does seem blocky and basic and it may be worth considering other ways to approach it in the future. However it does have a retro/early computer games and 1980's feel which I do like. This links back to the first song that sampled the drum break coming from that decade. The black background whilst plain does clearly allow the words to be spelt out and works with both the Winston's animated covers and the other covers building.