The main photo featured in this design was taken at the Hotel Duquesne Eiffel in Paris, France. Location: 23 Duquesne Avenue, 75007
I started working on Duquesne last Monday. I had high hopes to finish the design and video within a few days instead of a full week later. However, Monday was an interesting turning point in making this album. I had a huge mental meltdown. I just completely lost it while staring at the photo you see to your left. I wanted to use it because I think it was beautiful picture of Paris from my hotel room balcony. You can see the Tour Montparnasse (Montparnasse Tower) in the background and the iron balcony railing which I think looks really cool. Yet… I had no idea how to approach this design. As I mentioned in previous posts, I took almost every picture at the wrong size, including this one. I was thinking at the time that the base of designs shouldn’t start off with a puzzle that I’m trying to put together like Sleeping Faun. I do love that design but it was a tough one to make. I started trying to figure out how to make this design work because I wanted the main photo to be centered and the star. Where you can clearly see Tour Montparnasse in the background and also the balcony railing. I worked on piecing together different parts of the photo and after a few hours all I kept thinking was this is a nightmare. This whole album is going to be nightmare. It has been a nightmare and I’m completely devastated because this is supposed to be the BIG album. The album of a lifetime. I should be able to make designs easy at this point in my career as an “artist”. Or at the very least start off with a good foundation. I know most designs don’t look like the original base but I wanted this album to be less abstract and feature Paris. When you see a design, I would like for you to see that it’s featuring a location or sculpture in Paris instead of something 100 percent abstract.
So… In saying all of that above, I’ll be honest and I went to my comfort zone, my self destruct comfort zone. I’m not happy to say this but I want to be transparent. I’m only three designs in and I already feel like this album has tested me in ways I didn’t expect or could imagine. I have no idea how my mental state will be at the end of this journey. I thought maybe the hardest part was going to Paris but I was so wrong. So very wrong… I won’t say what I did but it was worse from my previous self destructive moment that I talked about very briefly in the Double Edge Sword of Reality. In that post, I mentioned how hard it was to adjust from my trip to Paris. Now, I feel like I set myself up to fail with this album. My mental state has worsen with each design. It took me a week to recover from what I did last Monday. I finally feel good today. I’m not ashamed. I fully admit that I may not be sane at this point in my life. I really don’t care how this looks to someone reading this post.
On Tuesday, I continued working on the design and I was starting to get very upset again and stopped working after about two hours. Same thing happened on Wednesday and by that point, I thought to take a small break and not worry about the deadline. I know I will most likely not finish this album by March 29th. I hope I’m at least halfway but it’s taking me so much time to make a design and music video. I don’t want to rush through making any designs or videos. I’ve done that in the past and I can definitely see the difference in quality.
Thursday night was the positive turning point. I was thinking there has to be a way to make this design work and have the aesthetic I was looking for in a base. I thought to mirror and duplicate the base photo a few times within the width of my canvas which is 2560. The original dimensions of the photo are 1960 by 4930. The height is insanely high and that had to be reduced to 1440 or close to that size. I needed to keep the integrity of the height so the width had to be reduced to 706. That’s a lot of empty space! I felt like I hit a small revelation when I mirrored the photos. It’s similar to the collage effect I did and eventually will post for alternate versions of Pierre. In the music video, you can see the finished version of what I did at the 20 second mark. I did end up using the rotating mirror effect in Paintshop during the design process and it really made me love the look. I love how Tour Montparnasse looks in the final version. It’s like the tower is part of the balcony and the building in the background that’s across the street from the hotel takes center stage and looks more like a museum. Kind of looks like the art museum in Philly a little bit when staring at it.
I have to say despite the initial meltdown in the beginning, I absolutely adore the final design and the music video! The abstract drawing is blended into the background. I feel like it creates the clouds and definitely enhances the overall look of the original base. To me, the design is an alternate reality of the same moment in Paris. I think you can tell Tour Montparnasse is in the background. I was loving the colors so much and I had a hard time picking my final version. I did have some issues with textures but the alternate versions have slightly better textures, maybe… It’s smoother for sure. The original has a nice mixture of brushstrokes and colored edges. I’m just going to let the color blends guide me with this album. They are helping me in so many ways. If I stuck with a theme I would probably be still working on this design.
The music video… WOW! That’s all I want to say. I’m actually shocked I made this one. I had so much fun making this video. I think the main reason is the song. I used quite a bit of music from Talk Less Say More in past videos. While searching for music, I discovered he made an album in 2017 that I didn’t know about and I was blown away! I’m so grateful that I’m able to use it in some capacity. I can’t use any songs for the video album but since I’m not using the speed art videos commercially then it’s all good. I was going to use another song but it didn’t take me too long to finish the design so I thought to use a song that was less than 3 minutes. I love Repeating… This song is awesome and I listened to it so many times while making the video. As I mentioned in the past, I always like to visualize the animated effects (motion tracking in Vegas). I love to animate the live recording to the beats of the song. This time since you can see the balcony mirrored in the video so I thought to have that part dance back and forth with the beats. I think it looks great. I think this video rivals Lighthouse with being my favorite. It’s in my top 5 for sure!
I feel like a broken record but I really do hope the next design and video are beautiful. It meant the world to me to have a chance to go to Paris and I want dedicate the best designs and videos for this album. I know I’ve improved since my first music video in 2012 and it’s important that this album is a success to me. It has to be. It needs to be…
P.S. Happy Valentine’s Day! I always seem to write posts on this day and Halloween.
Credits
Programs used: Sony Vegas 19, Paintshop Pro 21, & Bandicam
Design Base: Photo taken outside of a hotel room balcony in Paris (Hotel Duquesne Eiffel) and Digital Abstract Drawing
Music Video and Art Design created by me (Katherine Barnett|BeatnikBlends)
Motion loop in video: Silk Print Screen Loops 001 (28) by LiorSadehStudio
Song used: Repeating by Talk Less Say More