Hardcore Animation M.Video

001 - Project

Hardcore animation is an animated music video I created as the final assignment to my bachelor's degree in graphic design at Westerdals Oslo ACT. As it was my final bachelor assignment it had to be done in conjunction with academical research where I could explore a field of my choosing. I already made up my mind from the beginning to work with music since it’s a personal interest of mine and something I could easily invest a lot of time and effort into. Now the task was to formulate a problem I could explore that had relevance to both music and visual communication. The subject I ended with researching came from a personal observation I had with music where culture and history have a huge impact on how the visual representation ends up being. Where did the genre originate, and by whom? What were their economic status, what was their forerunning culture or identity? Does it have a political meaning? One can say these aspects do have an impact on how the music ends up sounding, but my initial observation was that when you listen to a song through a media that doesn’t present a visual representation of either the song itself or its gerne the only visuals you can perceive is your individual imagination and the attributes the music communicates musically. Maybe your perception of the song gives you an idea of a visual expression which is totally different than its original representation purely based on what the music communicates to you. This was the subject of my research, and the music video is the product of how a song can be perceived if you remove the culturally established aspect and solely base the visuals representation on what the music directly communicates.

002 - Limitation

I limited the project to one music genre which ended up being a childhood favourite of mine – Hardcore punk. It narrowed down what attributes I would identify, who I would engage the research with and ultimately lay the foundation of what I would visualize at the end of the project. What I wanted to explore was mainly what people's perception of the genre were without the culturally established elements and if these perceptions could be boiled down to a set of attributes I could base my design on. The data would also be used in an academic text where I put it against some source material to see if it could illustrate or contradict what the material claimed. For those interested the material was based heavily on the book “Synesthetic Design, a handbook for a multisensory approach” by Michael Haverkamp.

003 - Research

I needed to plan how I was going to acquire the data, and since this is a study of people's subjective opinion about music genres it only felt natural to use interview as a method. To prepare for the interview I did an analysis of the genre myself to get data to compare with the results. The questions I prepared was twofolded, some of the questions were qualitative for the purpose of identifying if the person in question were personally interested with the music genre and the other were quantitative for the purpose of gathering and compare with my results. The reason I chose to identify if the subject by interest was caused by previous experiences of talking to people with small to no interest in the gerne. These subjects would typically only characterize the genre as noisy and wouldn’t go into further detail since it isn’t a topic they’ve formulated much opinion on due to lack of interest. Therefore, interviewing subjects that could formulate opinions due to personal interest would generate more nuanced and in-depth data. When the questions were prepared I then went to locate some people who had interest in hardcore punk at my university and began an anonymous interviewing process (as in personal information wouldn’t be a component of the result). After each interview I asked the subject if they knew other potential subjects with background in the genre, and thereon I snowballed a selection of interesting subjects with a diverse background in relation to the genre. Some were musicians, others were just fans or popular characters in the community, some even were producers and event managers. I even got representation from most big cities in Norway. This accumulated data I then distilled into key attributes the subjects would use to characterize the genre. The attributes were as follows: Aggressive, energetic, hard and fast.

005 - To be continued

To be continued