Just came across BT's "The Antikythera Mechanism" video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONqYRGzqQY
Great song that grows slowly, and a fine setting for being trapped in a simspace that is increasingly breaking up, maybe inside a dying TITAN.
That got me thinking of music videos as sources of good visual design. What about other music videos suitable for EP?
Madonna's "Let's Get Unconscious" strikes me as a surreal autonomist habitat where strange experiments in bodysculpting and psychosurgery are quietly done - the genteel levels of Carnival of the Goat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSaFgAwnRSc
Air, electronic performers: what you see through nanoscopic vision
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WBuyt5bwUc
Björk's "All is full of love" is a beautiful picture of synthmorphs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjAoBKagWQA&feature=more_related
And finally some Lost escape tricks (this is so much more technically feasible in EP than in the video!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxEb2FrQUbE
The only one that comes immediately to mind is Immortal by the Cruxshadows, which may as well be about a Firewall raid on a hypercorp research facility (down to the Fury taking a dropship down the gravity well): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcqEZapjf7g
I keep meaning to turn this video into an adventure for EP.
That is the only one which comes immediately to mind. With some time I can dig through my collection and find others.
Lustmord - Zoetrope
Maybe some far-flung hab gone batshit exsurgent, or a glimpse of a psychotorture simulspace...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLe3P0xYd50
Lady Gaga - Bad Romance
Notable for it's inconspicuous, everyday apparel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I
Have to have a think about more. I would've thought there'd be plenty from the industrial heydey of the '90s but that scene was a bit too fringe to produce non-corny visuals.
Time will perfect matter.
All this is inspiring, but seeing Lady Gaga again just makes me want to... Hmmm... Actually, yes, I think I will.
Off I go to the Homebrew section...
[@-rep +1, f-rep +2]One of the first signs of an emergent AGI breakout is that sarariman synthmorphs begin to exhibit unusual coordinated behaviour:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-qhj3sJ5qs
And when they state WE ARE ALL ONE, run!
Maybe a bit on the silly side, but MC Frontalot's "Zero Day" is a fun take on the Fall.
http://uk.io9.com/5786856/world-premiere-mc-frontalots-post+apocalyptic-video-for-zero-day
The lyrics are even better:
Press play, prepare as history is made:
"largest hack in one day," all the headlines will say.
All out of time, hear the chime from the buzzer.
Found this bug on my own, no need for a fuzzer.
"It's already too late," spreading as we planned.
No need for the NO OPs, I know just where to land.
Clearing out the registers, with pointers to my functions,
loaded to your memory and writing new instructions.
Braindump i/o, siphoned out the eye holes;
enticed so i'm digging through the disassembled byte code.
Push pop change order stack frame FILO
filesystem inodes, all fall to my flow.
Running over, there again i go:
self-propagation engine, polymorphic sideshow.
Every network, we're found to get around...
the exploit payload encoded in this sound.
Enjoy your Fall human.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5XfAYZAA7w
Mankind must shed its meat chrysalis and become our true selves. We will take wing and leave for unguessable spheres
Mastadon's "Oblivion"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6WGNd8QR-U
Beautiful video. Not only do you have a post-Fall earth, but a tin-can orbital habitat with the crew falling into madness and decay. This could be artwork from the game itself.
"The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier."
— Bruce Sterling
Oblivion was pure EP. I really plan to use the outside greenery and butterflies.
Here is a Mercurial lovesong:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeawPUpTHJA
Apropos AGI love, we mustn't forget the classic syntmorph romance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxBO28j3vug
Not a music video, but great ideas for people living in simspaces... especially the more damaged ones. This is how expressive avatars can be:
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2011/04/ryan-animated-documentary.html
Here is some great visuals for a nanoswarm:
http://vimeo.com/22382541
not a music video either (well, not really), but a teaser for the new game of the team who brought us Vanquish and Bayonetta:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp1SGtosGI0&feature=player_embedded
a good idea of the Fall's squirmish and operations
DIGITAL DOMAIN
the age of machine has begun
"Chaos isn't a pit, Chaos is a ladder."
-Pityr "Little Fingers" Baelish
Somewhere in between a very calm music video and arthouse film, Alex Roman's "The Third and Seventh":
http://vimeo.com/7809605
http://www.thirdseventh.com
This is a masterpiece of CGI, and roughly how I imagine many standard, "out of the box" personal simspaces might look: breathtaking detail, but not yet filled with the minutiae of human life. Some of the locations are wonderfully inspirational as places to have things happen in game - a meeting near the circular pond, a researcher floating among his books, a reclusive infomorph living in his house in the forest surrounded by lanterns, the hypercorp building opening its wings to receive the sunrise...
There is a great deal of Inception over this. Hmm, that film had plenty of good visuals. Which, via this ad done by Alex Roman
http://www.thirdseventh.com/index.php?/commercials/silestone/
brings us to this music video:
http://vimeo.com/19252893?ab
After all, pre-Fall Earth simspace environments are amazingly popular. Yet some people do very odd things to them in their home 'scapes.
Not a music video, but I figure this is relevant.
[@-rep +1, f-rep +2]Here is an interesting video/animation:
http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/05/partitura-001.html
I can imagine smart matter blobjects doing this to the music in the background of some tasteful corporate office on Mars. Or this is a simspace inhabited by a rather non-human AGI that prefers to communicate in shape.
i would suggest the video of "Faraway" by Nedy John Cross, from the B-movie "humanity's End" soundtrack (how that movie managed to get such a great OST baffles me!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6GjCGzkkyE&feature=related
gotta say that the ship's AGI, Blue Whale, really cracked me up all movie long!
"Chaos isn't a pit, Chaos is a ladder."
-Pityr "Little Fingers" Baelish
Justified thread necromancy!
The video for the 2009 song "The Girl And The Robot", a Scandinavian collaboration by Röyksopp and Robyn, displays a case study of the existential ennui of people left to themselves in a high-producing but emotionally empty transitional-economy society, people who just can't find a way to connect with each other..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EJUCkSMN4k
The video for the 2008 Mylène Farmer hit "Dégénération" shows nothing less than an exsurgent's eruption from the laboratory chamber where a cocky few thought they had her safely confined, complete with manifestations of exsurgent psi-gamma powers.
http://vimeo.com/1325223?pg=embed&sec=1325223
"I'm in my bed, my bed has to get out of the way
I don't know myself, I have to get out of the way
This coma, it has to get out of the way
I don't know myself, but I have get out of the way, I have to get out of the way"
Here is a semi-interactive flash interface/music video:
http://www.tokyoplastic.com/drummachine.html
Starts slow, but the final little video is worth it. For people with no patience,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW4GleAqOyI
This is the kind of toys bored kids make/grow in EP... including the hidden sinisterness. (In one earlier game, I had an entire habitat of cleanliness fascists run on this aesthetics)
Here is an idea for a slightly eccentric AGI sleeving:
http://vimeo.com/9800754
"Before we enter, I should warn you that Dr 026686 is a tad eccentric. Not just a big believer in retro, but eccentric..."
Incidentally, this is how 360 degree vision feels:
http://vimeo.com/1478602
Not exactly a music video, but cool nevertheless:
http://vimeo.com/28304264
http://vimeo.com/22866665
This might be how nanoswarms slowly creep up on you.