Sages of Future Soul Album Cover

This piece is another album cover commission, this time for the big band ensemble of Shawn Davern and The Sages of Future Soul.

The client was looking for artwork to represent the new group’s sound. With a general idea of a central character already in place, I adapted the tone into the moonlit forest setting, and developed the cyborg character with an inspiration from classic comic books. The color palette was subsequently limited to evoke that feeling and adhere to older printing standards.

The end result was the dramatic composition of a low angle shot of the character backlit against a starry night. More artistic liberties were taken with the forced perspective of the trees curving inwards to add more atmosphere.

The font choices and composition were a more difficult process due to the shear amount of information that needed to be included without obscuring or distracting from the rest of the piece. The titles featured a stylized font that carried the sleek and futuristic aesthetic of the content. The title itself is set apart in the hierarchy by various gradient, outer glow, and transparency effects all used in conjunction. The remaining information text was less involved, utilizing a simpler sans serif font for readability.

Sages of Future Soul Animation

When it was decided that the song would include an accompanying video, the idea was thrown around to include an animated interlude in the same style as the album artwork. The best way to accomplish this was using the same artwork as a basis, but this presented a few issues.

The original artwork was not optimized to be manipulated as a motion graphics project, the completed artwork had to be delicately cut apart into layers, and in many cases redrawn. The body in particular was separated into multiple pieces to aid in the animation process and allow for more secondary motion and realism in motion.

Perhaps most time consuming was cutting out the individual tree branches from the background. It was imperative that there be motion applied to the background to not have large portions of the image be static; gusts of wind move them back and forth cyclicly.

The other major issue was converting the aspect ratio of the square album cover artwork into a widescreen video. Various remedies were concocted: simply leaving the square animation with black “pillarboxes” on each side, or blurring and resizing the piece to fill in the empty spaces, as it often done when adapting vertical video. Simply cropping the video would not work as important information would be lost in the conversion to a 16:9 ratio. The best solution was inevitably the hardest; redraw the empty spaces. Thankfully, Photoshop optimized the process and provided an automated process to fill in large areas based on existing patterns. This essentially eliminated the work on the star field, but covering the seams in the trees still required manual work.

The primary motion was achieved by having the character slowly trudging forward in a walk cycle. The process used a combination of moving/rotating the layers of the body, as well as using the puppet warp on larger areas. Smaller special effects involved adding a periodic blink to the character and a pulsating glow to the orb.

A larger effect added later on was the parakeet taking flight mid-animation and landing back on the cyborg lady’s shoulder. This was essentially the same process as before with separating the existing art into layers and redrawing areas that would be seen during the animation.

The final step was generating an animated star field that subtlety shimmers, but still keeps with the rhythm of the animation.

Click here to listen to the full song with visuals.