Post 18: Tackling the "Dies Irae" at last!

    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

Post 17: Paper Doll Animation Test

   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.
    

Post 16: Back to the Animated Paper Doll Idea

     I sent an e mail to the Artist I had mentioned in a previous post that sold very whimsical Marie Antoinette paper dolls on Etsy, asking if it would be OK to use them in an animated sequence, and she said it was fine. I suppose I could design my own, but that's a lot of extra work and time for a result that may not be any better. Her dolls come already equipped with my trademark "Steampunk" wheels(well, I might change them), clockwork and winding keys, but retain a frilly appearance. They could be used as puppets in a 2D Animation made in After Effects. I started cutting them up, in a bit of reverse engineering, and just to see, placed them in front of a stylized Versailles:

   I think they look pretty good, and would bring a bit of whimsy to the obligatory solemnity of the Requiem.   I will do a short Animation Test in After Effects, and see how it plays...

Post 15: How About a Cherubini Requiem Music Video?

   I think I have said before that the time when I first wake up is often for me a time to generate new ideas and brainstorm.
   The idea that dawned on me this morning is to produce an adapted 1920 x 1080 version of the show, and sell it as a Classical Music Video. I wonder have not found anything like it done by another Symphony orchestra. If we could make a recording of the music in advance, it could be actually be sold the day of the performance. Or we could take orders for it.
  Of course, I am throwing the idea out not knowing whether Carlos and the Symphony would want to do something like that...

Post 14: Injecting a Steampunk Flavor into the mix...

    I am as you may know "into Steampunk", and have an ongoing Steampunk Project. I have studied early balloons, dirigeables, airships, steamships and submarines at length, including Monturiol's 1850 beautiful wooden Ictineo .
   So I wouldn't mind introducing a "Steampunk flavor" to the whole thing, with wheels, spring motors, clocks, period vehicles. After all , the first steam powered vehicle, Cugnot's clumsy "Fardier" was built in 1769:

and Trevithick's wonderfully whimsical and fanciful London Steam Carriage was built in 1803:

   One could imagine such a contraption would have made it to the court. After all, the King was known to be a keen locksmith, and more interested in mechanics than in economics or politics.
   Steamboats were also experimental at the time, and we could conceive of one gracing the "Pièce d'Eau" together with rowboats and sailboats... Actually, the very first steam-powered ship "Pyroscaphe" was built in France in 1783 by the Marquis Claude de Jouffroy and his colleagues as an improvement of an earlier attempt, the 1776 Palmipède. I was a paddle steamer powered by a Newcomen steam engine, and we know what it looked like, as there is a model in the Maritime Museum in Paris:

   Also, the American engineer Robert Fulton, then living in Paris, designed the first working submarine, the "Nautilus" between 1793 and 1797, while living in France. It's design is even more whimsical than that of the London Steam Carriage:

    He asked the French Government to subsidize its construction but he was turned down twice. Eventually he approached the Minister of Marine himself and in 1800 was granted permission to build. The shipyard Perrier in Rouen built it and it sailed first in July 1800 on the Seine River in the same city.  When tested his submarine went underwater for 17 minutes in 25 feet of water, an amazing feat. 
    Just fantasizing guys!

Post 13: Another Side Trip, this Time Through Paper Doll History

   One thing tends to lead to another when I start brainstorming, and the playing card research led to another king of paper product that started to be created in the early 19th Century, about the time Cherubini was making landscapes cutting up playing cards.
   Even though I am working on a Light Show, everything here is revolving around paper it seems: the written music itself, going from Cherubini's manuscript to published printed score

the prints from the period that I have collected and gathered to tell the story in images

the documents and manuscripts by Royal hands

 the portraits of French kings and queens:

the playing cards I started designing

 and now the incredible wealth of paper dolls inspired by Marie Antoinette, to this day. There are delightful 19th Century plates:

old advertisement paper dolls

whole books , cutout figures and  sets of clothes still being designed by Artists

 especially the almost three dimensional collection of whimsical scenes by Rhonda Knauf on Etsy:

     These really got me thinking theatre, with the two sided design, the accessories, the spring winding key, the wheels(I love wheels). I then ran across these two jointed paper dolls:

and started brainstorming about a 2D animation sequence with paper sets.

  A while back, I got interested and researched old children toy theaters:

 and some of their contemporary re interpretations:

   I can envision building one of these in 3D in After Effect, cutting the paper dolls into parts, adding wheels, sets based on Versailles, and coming up with a sequence technically similar to the dancing écorché's "Danse Macabre" sequence in my Light Dreams Show:

   Except that the puppets would be Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, the Princess of Lamballe, and other "courtisans", and the sets would be the Hall of Mirrors, the Gardens, the Lake, the Trianon, the Farm, any part of Versailles I could rebuild as a 3D stage:

Post 12: A Side Trip to Playing Cards History

    How this came about, I don't remember exactly... Something to do with Marie Antoinette's taste for games, and games that people played in the 18th Century. Also, there is this little teasing tidbit of information about Cherubini being so dejected and depressed around 1807-1808 that he stayed home cutting up playing cards and assembling them into landscapes. I could not find any corroboration or any images of the landscapes in question anywhere else:
     "Disappointed and discouraged by lack of recognition, Cherubini produced scarcely anything in the two years which followed. He was broken-hearted and in ill health.He divided his time between drawing, botany, and cutting up playing cards into figures and landscapes which he framed and placed on the walls around his study. Not until 1809 was he aroused from this morbid indolence". 
   Still, it is an interesting visual proposition, so I looked for and found a bridge deck of French Royalty Playing cards. 

  They are not bad, but really a bit too traditional for my taste. Platnik Austrian cards...
  So I suddenly found myself designing my own deck of Royal Playing Cards in Photoshop... Things are still very fluid, but just to give you an idea, here is what I have so far: 

Louis XVI

 and Marie Antoinette

                  Louis XVIII

and Marie Josephine de Savoie

Henri IV

                                             and Marie de Medicis

                                                      Francois Premier

  I also have a few variations  for the backs of the decks, using a border from  Masonic Board, and old prints from the period:

 I don't know yet how I will use them in the show, but have no doubt they will find their place. The projection is a huge  5760 x 1080 pixels, so I am designing the cards 3000 x 2000 pixels, which is about as large as possible with material found on the Internet.