A world gone soft
Episode 5: “This Alternate Reality.” This one is loosely inspired by one of my favorite childhood games, Nights into Dreams on Sega Saturn, specifically a level where the whole world was soft, and as your character got close to the environment, the environment collapsed. That idea, physics quietly stopped applying, is what I wanted to pick back up here: an elevator that’s a little soft, that reacts to sound at the level of the sound itself. That’s also what pushed me toward building the wave.
Written for me
The lyrics surprised me; I projected myself into William’s text more than I expected. That’s usually how it goes with a song I like: I end up convinced the words were written for me specifically. “Trade my soul for a rhyme” is a line I find both powerful and beautiful, and “color blind” reads to me as a loss of the sense of reality. I wanted to represent the pleasure taken in that state through the position of the figure, quietly watching what’s happening outside while the elevator just keeps going down, indefinitely.
The elevator, the flood, the explosion
The “normal” part was already in place early on: the elevator visibly descending, the lyrics scrolling by. I see this song as a flood of thoughts, and at some point in it, an irritation starts rising. That’s what the exploding red is for; it crystallizes the anger I feel building toward the end of that bridge.
I also enjoyed playing with the camera to make the lyrics scroll both in front of and behind the elevator; it echoes that same flow of thoughts: what we see, what we hear, what we read, the background noise, what stays with us, what just passes in front of our eyes.
Spotify Canvas loop created from this visualizer
See you next week for episode 6, the “wonderful, magnificent” “Dancing in Wonderland.” 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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