La création du monde @ Hirson, France / December 9th 2015

On December 9th, our animation, La création du monde, was screened twice at the Salle de l'Eden, Hirson, as part of the ONE is more programme of cultural activity. Created originally as part of the ACT/CAA collaboration, the animation was animated and art-directed by course alumni, Jordan Buckner and Tom Beg - but its imagery was 'crowd-sourced' from the entire CAA creative community as part of an innovative, large scale collaboration.

We were reunited once more with conductor, Arie van Beek, and the musicians and backstage crew of the Orchestre de Picardie. With the orchestra in place - and the audience in their seats - our animation was rear-projected onto the stage of the theatre, as the musicians played Darius Milhaud's 1923 ballet. Behind the scenes, Keith Burden, of Clever Projections, had installed and synched a powerful projector to a bank of computers, enabling us to keep the animation in-synch with the live performance of La création du monde. 

This venue was more intimate than Abbeville, without the formality of a proscenium arch or other theatrical trappings.  In some ways, these performances captured perfectly the underlying philosophy of the ONE is more initiative - that sense of classical music and the visual arts being encountered by new audiences in alternate spaces.  As the lights dimmed, and the orchestra began to play, and the first flurries of form and colour materialised on screen, the Salle de l'Eden was transformed, and its audience transported.

La création du monde @ Abbeville, France / December 7th 2015

On December 7th, our animation, La création du monde, was screened at the Théâtre municipal, Abbeville, as part of the ONE is more programme of cultural activity. Created originally as part of the ACT/CAA collaboration, the animation was animated and art-directed by course alumni, Jordan Buckner and Tom Beg - but its imagery was 'crowd-sourced' from the entire CAA creative community as part of an innovative, large scale collaboration.

We were reunited once more with conductor, Arie van Beek, and the musicians and backstage crew of the Orchestre de Picardie. With the orchestra in place - and the audience in their seats - our animation was front-projected onto the stage of the theatre, as the musicians played Darius Milhaud's 1923 ballet. Behind the scenes, Keith Burden, of Clever Projections, had installed and synched two powerful projectors to a bank of computers, enabling us to keep the animation in-synch with the live performance of La création du monde. 

As with our previous screenings, the animation looked utterly ravishing in-situ, playing out above the heads of the musicians, its flurries, colours and crescendos appearing in the darkness, as if summoned into being by the music itself.

La création du monde / Tom Beg & Jordan Buckner

CAA / ONE - A Three Year Collaboration Between CG Artists & Classical Musicians Begins!

An Orchestra Network for Europe – ONE - is a distinctive network of classical symphony orchestras initiated by Orchestre de Picardie in 2003. Since 2005, it has received support from the European Union under the Culture Programme for 4 cultural projects. Its successive periods of activity have been called ONE, ONE - a new dimension, ONE step further and from June 2011 to 2015 ONE goes places. In 2010, under the title ONE is more, it prepared an application under the Creative Europe programme of the EU. For this bid, the University for the Creative Arts joined the partnership.

UCA was invited to participate in ONE following the success of a previous European-funded project  - ACT (A Common Territory) - which saw staff, students and alumni from UCA's Computer Animation Arts, Creative Arts For Theatre Film, Television Production and Graphic Design: Visual Communication collaborate with orchestras, performers and performances in France and in the UK. Initiated in 2011 by the Orchestre de Picardie, ACT (A Common Territory) is a network of five French and eight English cultural operators, working from the local to the European level in complementary sectors ranging from classical music, contemporary dance, secondary and higher education, production and community work. 

As part of ACT, Computer Animation Arts participated in three distinct projects: we created a seventeen minute animation in response to Darius Milhaud's jazz-inspired ballet La création du monde, designed to accompany live performances of the piece, as performed by the musicians of Orchestre de Picardie.  Our next challenge was turning Verdi's Requiem into seven physical sculptures by using animation software to translate the conductor's movements into three dimensional forms.  For our final ACT collaboration, we used 3D modelling software to design a series of kinetic props to be used in a touring performance of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde.  

Still from La création du monde / Tom Beg / Jordan Buckner / July 2013

Offertorio derived from Verdi's Requiem / Ethan Shilling / Tim Hall / July 2014

Noye's Fludde / Cirque Jules Verne / January 2015

Computer Animation Arts' first activity as part of ONE sees repeat screenings of our animation, La création du monde alongside the musicians of Orchestre de Picardie in two venues in France: Théâtre Municipal, Abbeville on December 7th, and at the Salle de l’Eden, Hirson on December 9th.

Part archive, part creative studio, this blog will chronicle our continuing adventures as we collaborate with some of Europe's finest orchestras and seek to develop creative new responses to challenging  and exciting projects.  Watch this space.