A long time ago, I saw a movie clip called “Pipe Dream” from a company called Animusic. I loved it! Here’s a brief clip:

The concept behind the whole project is so fascinating. On the first note, the whole thing is raytraced. (For those that don’t know, in its most rudimentary form, raytracing is a method of creating computer generated images where an imaginary ray is shot from the viewers eye through an imaginary window/frame. The ray bounces around an imaginary scene and through various calculations a single color is produced. That color is used to color the coordinate location that the ray passed through the frame. By simulating the ray for every possible coordinate location in the window, a complete representation of the scene is created. As you can imagine, the process of creating images (or “rendering”) can take quite a while. One image can take as long as several days to produce with the computer running at peak capacity. (In fact, my senior project at Utah State University in the Computer Science Department was to create a “render farm,” or in other words, a series of computers that work together to produce a single image much faster.)

Here is an example of a couple of raytraced images I came up with (in CS 6400 at USU):

As you can imagine, since video is really a whole bunch of pictures shown in rapid succession and sound added in, companies like Pixar make lots of money producing raytraced video. Animusic has taken this to the next step. Instead of tediously making the images line up with the spoken word (as Pixar does), Animusic has written their application to let the music drive the video. The music is created using MIDI music which is fed into the program. The program reads the music and calculates precisely when to make an instrument make a noise (or a ball hit a string) so that things line up beautifully.

Animusic has two DVDs out and I picked up both of them. If this kind of thing intrests you at all, I would encourage you to also purchase the DVDs. The DVDs are in a much higher quality than the YouTube video. The second DVD has all of the videos rendered in both Widescreen AND full screen. I’m a fan.