Steampunk Wonders Of The Worlds - Watercolors and Music

Have been working on a series of watercolor paintings that all involve strange locations and a Steampunk Airship with the theme of a tour of wonders of the worlds.  And by watercolor paintings I really mean black ink sketches colored with watercolors.

The music and surround sound effects for videos using the paintings has been an ongoing task for some time too.

We put up low and high resolution videos on YouTube today of what we have been working on.   The first new video for over a year now.

The HD version being here:

Even though the video is up, we are still considering the format, and how it should look.  We didn't just want a slide show with a soundtrack, so we have images titles, panning and zooming on the images....and a screen that could be from a following camera drone or surveillance video, but haven't made any of that clear.

It is put together in Sony Vega Movie Studio HD and rendered as mp4. The music tracks were done in Reaper and some of the strange sounds were done in SuperCollider, and others in the ArpV2600 vst.

The Dolby Surround Encoding just involves having effects sounds assigned to the rear, mono channel, which is encoded with +90 and -90 versions added into the front channels, all just done with the Reaper PhaseAdjust JS plug in.

To do more complex movement a Surround Panner is required, like this one, but we haven't done anything in this video using it.

We have our own simple LM833 based surround decoder device for driving the rear channels in our studio, prototyped on Veroboard and in a previous Blog post.  Have now also tried a HD Audio Rush Sound Decoder  (bought on eBay from HK) , just with the analog in and found our own device sounds better and is quieter.  The HD Rush also comes with a switch mode plug back that generates audible hash, that is not there when powered from a 5V linear supply.  

We have more ideas for the series, to make more episodes, but we will see.....  this type of music video, that isn't focused on cars don't get much attention on our video channel.  It is interesting to see that we have some 3 digit subscribers to our channel, yet only single digit views on a new video...

I guess they aren't interesting enough and don't say very much to a general audience.

Vehicles, Starships, Starbase Concept Designs and Sketches

GEV - Ground Effect Vehicle Concept Sketch, Dry Markers

We have done quite a few future tech designs over the years. Inspired by the likes of Ron Cobb and Syd Mead and others.

We used Letraset dry markers originally, and have used pastel, acrylics and the usual materials. Now have Copic W1~W10, but just as likely to scan a sketch and colour it in Photoshop, as we do have a Wacom tablet.  Pens are expensive, they dry out, are not so readily available any more.  An Inkjet printer ends up being more flexible.

Tracked Vehicle Concept Sketch, Dry Markers

Wanting to design the future is part of it.

Helicopter Concept Sketch Pastel and Marker

And there is this incredible challenge to design something cool that hasn't been seen before. And that is really really hard.

Retro Prop Bomber Concept Sketch, Dry Markers

This retro SF bomber is inspired by a few different historical and technological things, that I put together differently to make it unique.

Space Carrier Concept Sketch, Dry Markers

This Space Carrier is also based on aircraft carrier shapes. A nod to Star Wars too, but not one of their machines.

Here is a video with our original sketches and music.

We have been involved in developing real products, and we use the same design techniques and sensibility.

For more samples and hopefully cool stuff, visit Art & Technology.