My favorite song on the album
Episode 2: “My Burning Soul.” This is my favorite song on the whole album: the instrumental, Will’s voice, the lyrics, all of it. To understand the video’s theme, it helps to start with the lyrics themselves: to my eyes and ears, what comes through is the awareness of the end of a relationship, the end of a very intense passion.
Burning down to the skeleton
Coming off “Don’t Say Goodbye” with Franck’s art direction already established, I had a strong base to build this one from. The overall concept: the body’s envelope burns away to reveal the skeleton underneath, which in turn burns too, until only the burning passion itself is left. We kept the same elevator space from the previous video, materialized here by its bars, and the same man from “Don’t Say Goodbye.”
Visually, I wanted to keep something as beautiful and subtle as the piano notes that open the track, so the burn appears in small touches, and the intensity of those piano notes drives the intensity of the opening: the little spots that come through, the rays that get projected. Little by little, it becomes clear that it’s centered on the heart: it’s the heart that controls the burn. That moment is the one I like best in the whole song, and the one that moved me to tears the first time I heard it.
Three textures, driven by the piano
Technically, it’s all about textures: the mesh itself never moves; it’s entirely the texture work that makes the visualizer function. Everything starts from the intensity, the volume, of the piano. That intensity controls what I call the burn texture: a gradient that opens up over time, combined with noise to produce these small burning shapes, which cut through the coat’s black texture and drive its transparency. Three textures in total, all reacting to the noise of the piano.
The rays that shoot outward come from the piano and from a separate audio track I labeled “other,” because there are stretches with no piano where I still wanted the rays to keep radiating. In those moments, the rays get added by multiplying the size of the Glare, in effect the intensity of the sun’s rays.
Spotify Canvas loop created from this visualizer
See you next week for “Don’t Say Goodbye”; it came out a month or two ago and still doesn’t have many views, so go give it a look. The full series lives on the N U I T _ Alt Real case study, and the finished visualizer for this track is up on Instagram.
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