Alex Banks - 'Recall Mindset' Official Video
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After hearing Alex's thoughts, and the concepts he was exploring in this track and the upcoming album, I was reminded of a local woodland spot I would often walk through during the lockdowns. I spent a while there listening to the track over and again, allowing my imagination to abstract the space around me as I thought back to working (VJing) and dancing at various club nights and festival stages.
The sonic intensity of Alex's pounding dance-floor reminiscent track, brought forth visions of constant twists and turns in perspective, and a shifting lens revealing hidden layers in the environment. The dissonance between the ideas of recalling the club environment whilst in an outdoor daytime natural one particularly resonanted with me as I had, during the brief absence of a lockdown late in 2020, left my home in Bristol to live with my partner 300 miles north in the countryside to start a family.
While it was the best decision for us, it did mean that I had permanently left behind the live events culture I was previously embedded in. It hadn't signified and end to my work in the industry, but, abstracting the new space into an interpretation of the moving lights and FX of club and festival gigs, felt like the right way to interpret my experience of a 'recall mindset'.
It also gave me an opportunity to experiment with 360 footage, which had been on my wishlist for a little while. I used a GroPro Max, which shoots 5.6K 360 footage, and a Wiral Lite Cable Cam rig, to film long tracking shots through various bits of the woods, including through and around the fallen trees and exposed root systems from recent storms.
Once I had the footage, I used GoPro's Reframe plugin in Adobe Premiere Pro to edit it into a standard HD format, giving me the option to keyframe changes in the Pan, Tilt and Bend properties as well as the Zoom. The result was a dizzying rollercoaster ride through the trees. I changed the framing again down to Anamorphic HD (1920x817) to increase the cinematic feel of the film.
The next stage was to take this edit into Notch and use it with multiple particle systems to generate a set of full-length abstracted looks. In most of them I used the Optical Flow system to analyise movement within the footage and use that to push the particles around, creating a more deeply integrated abstraction from the original footage. Once a few Post FX had been applied, such as the Vector Blur, this fractured particle patterns became reminiscent of root and branch systems.
I added one affector that wasn't based on the footage itself, a shockwave pulse from the centre of the frame, that used the sub-base frequencies of the drum track to turn it's falloff up and down, while other properties looped without any input. The result was an audio-synced affect that almost never repeated itself, and was only visible on certain beats, enhancing the dissonance in the abstraction.
Once I had enough looks, I took these back into Premiere Pro and went through various stages of blending, compositing and cutting the layers into the finished piece, eventually including the original footage in places to keep some sort of anchor to the narrative.
Finally, I took the end segment into Resolume and rendered out some simple audio reactive RGB delays to lift the patterns out.
It was a lot of fun and a great pleasure to be given the opportunity by Alex and Mesh, the label releasing his music. Recall Mindset is the third single from Alex's latest album Projections, which is out in August, I highly recommend it!
Preorder the album and follow Alex on social media via the following links:
Continue down for some screenshots of the finished film.
