The Dies Irae is basically the most dramatic part of Cherubini's Requiem. There are undoubtedly other passages when the music heats up a little , but for the most part, the piece is mostly very harmonious flowing counterpoint for Chorus and Orchestra, absolutely beautiful, and totally angelic at times.
So I have been playing with ideas for the rest of the piece, but had so far stayed away from the Dies Irae, reserving it for the most dramatic moments of the story, namely the fall of the guillotine blade onto the King and Queen's supremely inbred and aristocratic necks...
I didn't want to be gory, but wanted to show at least a few drops of Royal Blue Blood.
I finally got an idea this morning using the coronation portrait of the King for a "virtual beheading", and played with it all day. I think it might work, I just have to keep it going for eight more minutes....
I loaded the Test on YouTube like the previous one, but "the Copyright Owner removed the Music Track". Apparently, they don't give a hoot about the Introit or the Graduate, but they don't want anybody to hear their Dies Irae for free...
Dies Irae Test 1
It actually took a lot longer than I expected to do the Test, and I only used only 4 of the dolls, but I am well pleased with the results, and am thinking of using some of the other dolls for other scenes in different settings.
This is a very first rough "quick draft", and I didn't make any attempt to synchronize the animation to the music, yet it appears remarkably smooth, which yields me to believe my job may not be as hard as I thought at first, since most of the Requiem is slow flowing music with relatively few dramatic moments.
The Dies Irae is going to be the hard one, and I am probably going to play with it next. It will also require much stronger images, and would almost have to be the climactic part of the piece, even though it's hardly half way through. Most music builds to a final climax, that is just not the case here.
I posted a small video of the test on YouTube:
PAPER DOLLS TEST 1
But it really doesn't do justice to the full 5760 x 1080 full size triple HD giant video playing on my 25 foot wide spandex screen...
One could conceive of a scene inside the Palace, may be in the Queen Bedroom(or her bathroom?), another in a salon at the Trianon playing games with "courtisans", or in the Farmhouse with milk maids and animals, or yet another in the Queen Theatre.
What I can do largely depends on the size and quality of the images I can find, as even though large images are becoming more common on the internet, my 5760 pixels wide canvas is still quite demanding.
