Christine Lemmer-Webber: In Unexpected Places: a music video

Today my girlfriend Vivi Langdon (EncryptedWhispers)
and I released the music video In Unexpected Places, available
on YouTube and
on PeerTube both.
It's based off of Vivi's song by the same name, available
on BandCamp
and on Vivi's Funkwhale instance!
It features some kind of retro video-game'y aesthetics but its story
departs from what you might expect from that while leveraging that,
more on this below.

Everything was made with Blender,
including some hand-drawn effects using Blender's excellent
Grease Pencil!
The video is also an open movie project; you can
download the full .blend file,
which is CC BY-SA 4.0,
and play around with everything yourself.
The eye rig is especially fun to control and the ships are too!

All in all this was project took about 6 months of "free time" (read:
weekends, especially at Hack & Craft)
to animate.
I played the music over and over again until I had a good story to
accompany it and then on a car trip I drew
the storyboard
on a pile of index cards from the passenger seat while Morgan was
driving, and when I got home I pulled up Blender quickly and timed
everything with the storyboard.
That storyboard was meant just for me, so it doesn't really look
particularly good, but it convinced me that this was going to work, and the
final animation
matches that hastily drawn storyboard very closely!

The title was Vivi's choosing and was selected after I storyboarded the video.
It references the phrase "love is found in unexpected places" and
references both the eye falling in love with the cube but also that
this music video was made shortly after Vivi and I fell in love (which
also happened in ways that felt surprising to be swept up into, in a
good way), and a lot of the depth of our relationship grew during the
half-year of making the video.

Some commentary about the narrative

You should watch the video yourself first
before reading this section to develop your own interpretation!
But if you are interested in my interpretation as author of the
animation and its script, here we go.

The video is a commentary about violence and the ways we are
conditioned. Without having watched the entire narrative, having just
seen clips of the "action sequences", this might look like a video
game, and a viewer used to playing video games of the genre seen (of
which I am exactly the type of person who both plays and makes games
of this genre, including with these tropes) would be most likely to
identify with and assume that the two ships which circle and attack
the eye are the "heroes" of the piece. Of course, we can see from the
comments here that most people are identifying with the eye, which was
the intention. Which then puts the viewer at a seeming contradiction:
identifying with the character they would normally be attacking.

Of course, villain-subversion tropes are hardly new, particularly
within the last couple of decades. But here I wanted to do so without
any written story or narrative. In particular, the question is to
highlight social conditioning. If I play a game and I see an eyeball
in space, I'm gonna want to shoot it! But what will you think the
next time you see a floating eyeball in a video game and assume you're
supposed to hurt it? The goal is to get you thinking about the way we
are conditioned from small signals towards aggression and
confrontation and to instead take a moment to try to approach from a
point of empathy. That the eye falls in love with the cube at the
beginning, and then when disabled or killed at the end is unable to
"see" the cube it fell in love with, is meant to be a bridge to help
the viewer along that journey. (The goal here is to less criticize
video game violence and more the kinds of conditioning we experience
in general, though you could use it to criticize that too if you like.)

Likewise, aside from the two ships that destroy the eye, there were
two prior ships that also seemed to be aggressive against the eye.
These are what I called the "scanner ships": they gather information
on the eye, and they confuse and irritate it but not in terms of long
term damage the way the "player ships" do, not directly. Instead what
they are doing is gathering information to send the players, hence the
"speech balloons with antennae on them". This is your briefing at the
start of the level, telling you in Star Fox or whatever what your
objective is. Their goal is to provide something "fun" for the
players to attack and destroy so that they may level up. They
represent the kind of media that we consume which pre-conditions us
against empathy and towards aggression.

Of course, this is just one interpretation, and it is not the only
valid one. I have heard some interesting interpretations about this
video being about the way we are pushed into engagement driven
consumption platforms and how it hurts us, and another about this
being about the way we wake up within the world and have to struggle
with what is thrown at us, and another which was just "whoa cool,
videogames!", and all of those are valid.

Regardless, I hope you enjoy. As a side note: no sound effects were
added to the music video, all of those were in the song. I shaped the
story around the song... you could say that the story "grew" from the
song. So amongst all the rest of the story above, the real goal was
to deliver an experience. I hope you enjoyed it!

Source: Planet GNU