Music videos made in AGS (new one added June 17, 2018!)

Started by Fitz, Sun 16/10/2016 19:57:55

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Fitz

I haven't been very active in the forums for a while now. But I've been super busy on another AGS project that's not a game. I've using our beloved engine to make music videos now!

It started with Zuri, the musician who kindly let me use one his songs in a teaser trailer for The Unprintable MAGENTA. We've become good friends since, and co-worked on various projects. So this one time, he wrote a new synthwave song, and then somewhat shyly offered it for a soundtrack for a future project -- and I loved it, and instantly knew where I wanted to use it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the song demands a more fleshed-out visualization. Ideas started flowing, and within 15 minutes I had a detailed concept for a whole music video. And since I don't have After Effects, I took to the one program I know: Adventure Game Studio. It was an insane decision, for many reasons, and it took its toll - but..

...some 2,5 months later, the video is finally done:


UPDATE Jan 10, 2017:

And here's another one -- which I did as a fan tribute for one of my favorite synthwave artists, VHS Glitch (and which he liked so much it is now the official video for the song)! This one I've done mostly in MOHO/Anime Studio, which I got recently and started playing around with -- BUT after some initial trials I decided animating all the keystrokes would be crazy, I made virtual organs in AGS. Then I grabbed the footage of myself whamming the hell out of my trusty keyboard and put the animation of that into the animation (laugh)


UPDATE Oct 30, 2017:

Here's a Halloween special!


Some time ago, after seeing my first video, the French synthwave band ELEVN, whom I'd been following with great interest from the start, approached me about creating visualizations for their live gigs. And so, over several months of blood, sweat and tears, driven by madness and black magic, I concocted the darkest, craziest creation of my entire life. This time it's pure-bred hellspawn of AGS, with no other magic involved: inanimate objects and undead characters moving around, vanishing and reappearing, changing size and tint in real time by the power of The Code... MUAHAHAAAA!!! (laugh)

UPDATE May 3, 2018:

Took me a while to get back into the swing of things - but I'm back with a new video made in AGS:


The song by the talented singer/songwriter/pianist Jennifer Doll nudged me in just the direction I'd been wanting to go: to do something cartoony and weird, silly and dark at the same time. Think Tim Burton meets Amanita Design. It also gave me the inspiration to keep going with these little, simple videos I make in AGS. I was actually originally making this one in Open Shot Video Editor - but when you have a 7 year old computer, playing with video editing software is more dangerous than juggling bricks of uranium. So after the damn thing started spazzing and almost fried my CPU, I went back and re-assembled the video in AGS. Oh, the things you can do with dynamic sprites and some tricky coding. Suffice it to say that there's barely any frame-by-frame animation - except the rolling paper ball, because I was lazy. Everything else - characters extending arms, the falling droplet, the leaf, the chewing caterpillar's head - is rotated/resized in real time by code. It seems I also figured out the code for character jumping (with the slow deceleration in mid-air and getting pulled down by Earth's gravity). Wish I actually knew the first thing about designing platformers because I could totally make one now ;)

UPDATE June 17, 2018:

And one mooooooo-re ;)


I was listening to this song by Here On Mars on one hot, sunny day & started slowly dozing off. Then this dream vision of a blue cow with orange patches against a red Martian sky hit me. That's when I knew it has to become a video. Originally I planned it to be just a series of static images of cows grazing, repeating and progressively turning more and more psychedelic. But the song is just so clever and insightful that I had to do more than that to do it justice. I tried to reference the lyrics in creative ways - with cows at the center of the metaphors. The result is six minutes of complete madness that might only make sense to me ;)

Amayirot Akago

That was pretty awesome :D Lovely 80's style visuals and a pretty decent tune to boot. Helps that I love anything related to Chris Hülsbeck :)
Quote from: CaptainDMy suspicion is that an accident, probably caused by a lightning storm and a mad professor, resulted in Amayirot's brain becoming inextricably linked to the databases behind MobyGames and LemonAmiga.

Fitz

Thanks :) Had so much fun making this -- especially since I'm an 80's kid myself (1980 FTW!). Though I never got to play Giana Sisters, and we didn't get NES in my neck of the woods till the early 90's.

selmiak

cool stuff. Is that rainwiper (is it called like this in english?) some sprite function? That eye/Iris made from lines to the center with more lines inside is pretty cool is this also some code trickery?

Cassiebsg

Sounds and looks great!
Good job! (nod)
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Jack


Fitz

Thanks :)

Selmiak: I did consider using drawing functions, as they'd make some thing easier, but I had no prior experience with those, and I had certain f/x in mind that I wasn't sure they'd handle. So yeah, it's all sprites :) It still required some trickery, as the wiper going left and the one going right right are two separate layers, and the vectory iris is three layers of lines with varying degrees of transparency to make the disappearing look smooth and gradual.

Danvzare

Woah, holy crap that was awesome! :shocked:
I can only imagine the amount of effort that must have gone into this.
That was incredible, and to think it was made all in AGS. Wow, simply wow.

Mandle

I SO WANT TO SEE THIS VIDEO PLAYING AT A RAVE ON GIANT SCREENS WHILE THE MUSIC PUMPS AT INSANE LEVELS!!!

Both the video and the music are insanely cool!

This deserves a new AGS award: The Coolest Application Of AGS 2016

Chicky

Dude I saw this on Facebook and it's proper ace! Your art fits the synthwave vibe really well, love all the minimalist close ups and transitions. I was pondering over why you chose AGS instead of AE or similar and thought it would be a neat idea if you released the compiled exe, in spirit of the demoscene visualisations of yesteryear. Seems like it would be a neat extra to compliment those who pay for the album or single.

Congrats man, must've taken some serious work timing everything to the music.

Fitz

Danvzare: I should clarify that while most of what you see is pure 100% AGS, three scenes have been tweaked in AE: the fake trailer (a VHS-like filter added, it looked like this originally), the cig & wine scene (displacement glitches), and the matrixy vector part at the end (some glow/bloom added here and there). But yeah, other than that, it was just multiple objects flying around, multiple layers pretending to be one object, transparencies and creative use of walk-behinds. I started working on the song's first demo it in July, and then on the finished song in since the end of August or so, usually a scene or two a day, putting in crazy hours at times.

Mandle: Zuri & his company actually frequently work for mass EDM venues, dealing in sound engineering and visualizations specifically, so he might just be able to do that!

Chicky: I did consider posting the video as a game here -- but in my very painful experience with previous projects the performance varies from system to system, severely lagging on older specs. My puter is 5 years old and boy did I have fun trying to get it to sync in all the right places.
Oh and the single is available as a free download, as everything released by Export Elite :)

cat


Problem

EXE or it didn't happen! :-D
But seriously, this is awesome! Must have been a ton of work.

Fitz

Cat: Thank you! And I agree about the song. Must've heard it hundreds of times while making the video and I still love it and enjoy listening to it :D

Problem: Might just upload it, then :) Not now, though -- it's late, it's a large file, and those things take ages to upload.

Baron


AnasAbdin

I loved every bit of it! It's on the 4th loop on my headphones now and I'm not getting up anytime soon  (laugh)
This is now my theme music every time I want to open AGS, and I do that a lot everyday  8-)

ThreeOhFour


MiteWiseacreLives!


m0ds

Very cool Fitz!! Incredibly stylish...and a great music track! binary rain, nice!

Fitz

Thanks, guys :) I really appreciate the great response. I've been toying with the idea of making music videos in AGS for years -- and actually kinda did that before, but it was an outro for a game, and only took me two days to make or so. This one was a stand-alone, and forced me to go a little more hi-tech (including HD), try completely new things, and use AGS mechanics in pretty unconventional ways.

Anas: It is an incredibly catchy tune, isn't it? Over the past few months I listened to every bit of it hundreds of times while planning and testing each scene, and I still love listening to it :)

Mods: Matrix was obviously a huge inspiration for the video -- but there's also one obscure movie from around that time called The 13th Floor that I drew from. It's a completely different take on the subject, and way more stylish, too. For the same reason I recommend seeing Dark City, another niche classic.

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