PROJECT INSIGHT
Avant-garde aesthetics
Slide guitarist Geiger von Müller and art director Pál Varsányi discuss their surreal new music video project
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vant-garde slide guitarist Geiger von Müller recently collaborated with awardwinning noise-electro and classical composer Elizabeth Joan Kelly on BlueMoonFrequency #2b [SpringMix]. The ambient, minimalist remix is accompanied by a 3D animated, sci-fi inspired video that forms the latest part of a series by Müller. The series is directed by Pál Varsányi, chief art director at Play Dead Studio, who returned to create mesmerising visuals to accompany this track.
3D World reached out to the pair to find out about the project’s origins, how they used public domain images from the NASA archive to create surreal 3D visuals, how Cinema 4D’s camera mapping technique was utilised and, of course, we ask Varsányi to share his expert advice with our readers so that they can create their own surreal sci-fi visuals.
What are the origins of this project?
Müller: A trilogy of short acoustic slide guitar tunes, BlueMoonFrequency (parts 1-3). From this, a music video series was born, including later audiovisual remixes. We have further additions in the pipeline, as we speak.
Can you tell us about coming up with the concept for the video?
Müller: The basic concept was to create some twisted protest audiovisuals. I feel it’s almost compulsory to have a protest element to one’s output in these times. We wanted to keep it all quite implicit. Thus we aimed at a surreal, retrofuturistic visual world to resonate with both past and future. Pál is a versatile visual artist and he decided to go for 3D CGI. It was an unorthodox choice for the slide guitar tunes but that’s exactly why it sounded perfect. I was sifting through public domain archives and when I came across some vintage images in a NASA collection Pál said, that’s it, they inspired him straight away. So we narrowed it down to 5-6 images from that collection and he started his 3D trickery.