Month 2: Goodbye 2025 aka the hardest month to stay motivated
"Anything you wanna try..."
Safe to say, this year absolutely FLEW by, but it did end on a very positive note. Midway through the month I had my second meeting with my mentor, Kira! To recap the goals for last month:
- Start my blog: check. ✅
- Re-familiarize myself with TouchDesigner: double check. ✅
- Look over the Dev Briefs and choose a project to focus on: triple check. ✅
I’ll come back to the second goal on my list in a bit, but for the third goal, I had fun starting with this one.
So for the mentorship we have the opportunity to work on “Dev_Briefs”. From reading through them, my understanding is these are previous projects that Fray Studios has previously worked on. They range from visuals for live music performances, musicals, and even exhibitions. My attention was instantly drawn towards the visuals for live music performance, specifically the brief for Two Door Cinema Club.
"...everyone's watchin', everyone cares..."
Brief_003 revolves around creating video content for Two Door Cinema Club’s song “Dirty Air”, presumably for a live performance. I thoroughly enjoyed peeking into Fray’s creative process of how they approach their projects, the structure of it made it very easy to understand. It goes as follows:
- Overview:
- The initial overview states the genre, artist, song details, and what the final product of the project is.
- Brief:
- Their brief goes into details of who the artist is and the expectations of the final product.
- Mood Board:
- Their mood board shows what they created after meeting with the artist.
- Additional Documents:
- How to break apart a song: very cool video that includes the song and breaks it down using bar count, bar beat, BPM and cutting up the song into intro, pre-verse, pre-chorus etc.
During my meeting with Kira, she went into a bit more detail of how they collaborated with the artist. Once they narrowed down the direction that the artist wanted to go towards, Kira mentioned that the team uses Pinterest and Milanote to get ideas and bring together their mood board. This is how I started my approach to the brief, first pinning on Pinterest and the moving it to a board on Milanote:
To create this mood board, I listened to their song “Dirty Air” over and over again as I scrolled through Pinterest. My first initial thought was an image similar to the ones found in the top right corner, the spiral-ish lines that kind of create the optical illusion of the image vibrating if you look at it too long. From there, the images started spiraling in.
After I had finished pinning them and dragging them into Milanote, I was able to arrange them into these 4ish sections.
- Top left:
- Aura vibes, a slow colorful shutter
- Top right:
- Spiral distortion, the kind that is hard to look towards at times.
- Bottom left:
- Collage-esque, constantly moving and evolving
- Bottom right:
- Collage-esque continued, but I kept visualizing eyes when I listed to the song.
My mood board went a different direction than Fray’s, they went for “household objects isolated in colour and ultra graphic” that “tie in with the album launch campaign”. Funny enough, after I created this mood board I went to take a look at that lyrics as a preview to move more towards figuring out what visuals I wanted to actually create for the song and stumbled upon the official video for the song. I didn’t fully watch it (briefly scrubbed through it) because glancing at the cover image, I saw it is a collage style music video, and I want to create something unique for the video.
Which leads me to the next steps: going through the song and figuring out what visuals I want to do.
"...anything to catch your eye..."
Now. Actually getting back into TouchDesigner was the hardest part this month, and this is before even adding in the challenge of creating some (maybe all?) of the visuals for “Dirty Air” on here. I go more into depth on the other part of this blog about what I’ve been working on in TD (lots of tutorials, also blog posts I’m behind on publishing as they currently live in my notes app.) but one thing I do mention is how it feels like coming home playing around in TouchDesigner. It’s been so much fun to work on and re-learn, even if some of the things I’ve created I lose the plot halfway through.
Another thing that I am attempting to do is create my online TD portfolio, but in a public space, aka Instagram. I created an IG dedicated solely to posting my generative art (@melancholy.lau), but right now I am struggling with posting as I feel that everything I post needs to be perfect or “instagram worthy.” My goal for January is to let go of that and just post.
"...whatever happens, the pleasure is all mine."
Last thing to wrap up this December blog, in our first meeting Kira and I had briefly talked about getting more into the TD community maybe joining discords or reaching out to my previous mentors just to rebuild the connections, I do still have yet to do either of those things BUT I did manage to narrow down a community in Dallas.
The first one being @newmediacontemporary.
New Media Contemporary is “Dallas’ 1st Experimental Listening Room.” They are an artist run gallery/studio/research space whose goal is to highlight New Media art and diverse New Music Genres. They regularly hold workshops and exhibitions that focus around projections, generative art, live performances and so much more. It is the perfect space showcasing everything I hope to do. Currently, they have an open call for Artists/Proposals for 2026 that closes in a few days. Anyone can apply, they are open to code, video, generative, interactive, immersive etc. I’ve been going back and forth trying to decide if I want to apply. A part of me feels that it’s not something I am quite ready for, but it is something that I plan on working towards for 2027. Who knows, tho, maybe I’ll apply on a whim to light the fire under me. I’ll keep you updated.
The second community that caught my eye was @dallasambientmusicnights.
They fully focus on creating performances that include collaborations between musicians and visual artists. I’m very fascinated by the events they are putting on, and my goal is to make it out to one of these events as an observer. The music and visuals that I see on their IG page are interesting and unique. Definitely experimental. Maybe another goal for later this year or in 2027 is to be a performer, definitely way out of my comfort zone, but it is something that I will set as a goal for myself.
Closing off the year working towards my goals of entering this world is something I look forward to and the excitement keeps growing.
