Moments before my scheduled phone interview with Manchester Orchestra frontman Andy Hull about using VR and 3D game engines to create videos to accompany the band’s latest album, I started to panic, realizing I didn’t know almost nothing on these platforms.
Hull laughed and immediately reassured me, “Well, I’ll probably be able to give you the most first year explanations as I can, and the other two artists you’ll be talking to will have much smarter things to say than me.
Of course, that wasn’t true, and the talented singer and songwriter told me how the creation of the two captivating videos for the latest album came about. The Valley of Vision (2023), the new project from the Atlantan band, is a riveting and cathartic dive into themes surrounding grief and loss, and marks some of their most ambitious tracks to date.
And Ppushing the boundaries isn’t exactly new to the band. A little over a decade ago, they hired director duo Daniels for the groundbreaking video that accompanied their song “Simple math.” The Daniels, the duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, recently shot to worldwide fame with their Oscar-winning film Everything everywhere all at once.
Movie taken from The Valley of Vision by Isaac Deitz which accompanies the Manchester Orchestra’s album of the same name. Courtesy of Isaac Deitz and the Manchester Orchestra.
“I guess I knew as much as anybody else,” about virtual reality, Hull said. “I’ve been to a few studios where they had headsets in the living room and you could, for example, shoot aliens and try not to get dizzy, and still be immersed in that experience. The real main idea I had connecting it to music was actually during the pandemic, to try to find a way for people to escape and focus on something.
At the time, Hull was working on the Manchester Orchestra’s 2021 album, The Million Masks of God.
“I thought it would be cool to have a visualizer that people could immerse themselves in while they listen. And I love cinema and movies,” he said. However, the idea was eventually scrapped, with the band deciding, “Let’s put this back in the fridge for a minute and see if it comes back.”
And it came back, especially after working with filmmaker Isaac Deitz, who created the well-received video to go along with the song.”Telepath” Since million masks. Hull said he admires the way Deitz “can take a small idea and really scale it. He worked extremely hard on it and created this heartbreaking two and a half minute video. It’s one of my favorite things we’ve ever done.
At the beginning of the production of the current album, shell told Deitz of his continued interest in having a film to accompany the music. “We were both fans of the Anima movie that Thom Yorke and Paul Thomas Anderson did together, and we thought it would be cool to script something. Just kind of like a big dream – who knows? Turn it off and see if anything happens.
Movie taken from The Valley of Vision by Isaac Deitz which accompanies the Manchester Orchestra’s album of the same name. Image courtesy of Isaac Deitz and the Manchester Orchestra.
“I had an abstract film that I had made with a heart in a block of ice,” Deitz told Artnet News in a phone interview. When he and Hull muted the movie and played it alongside the album’s first track, “Capital Karma,” with a time lapse of melting ice, it immediately clicked. “We both knew we were on to something,” Deitz said.
Hull said he kept coming back to the idea of virtual reality, but Deitz was skeptical because he generally adheres to the parameters of classic cinema and was something of a purist. Hull jokes that Deitz asked if Oculus was paying or sponsoring Hull’s idea.
For his part, Deitz shared that he had already had a lot of “2D” ideas and was worried that VR would look more like “sponsorship or some kind of gimmick”.
Filmmaker Isaac Deitz created the VR film that accompanies the latest Manchester Orchestra album The Valley of Vision.
But he gave in and started researching, especially after Hull assured him it wasn’t a VR ad. Specifically, Deitz started learning more about VR180, an emerging video format that offers a higher quality, but less immersive alternative to 360-degree video.
As Hull and the band continued to work on the album, Deitz also embarked on his own physical journeys, venturing to film a series of exotic, sometimes desolate and abandoned landscapes and incorporating them into the film.
“We haven’t talked too much about the creative level,” Deitz explains. “He just said ‘VR and abstract’. As I listened to the album over and over again, I just started feeling all these different themes and started exploring the idea of life and Deitz was also experiencing his own loss at the time of the death of a close friend and said music helped in the process.
Said Hull: “It was just trial and error, just grabbing all this footage and going, ‘oh man, not only does it work both ways, but it’s also one of the most more interesting than I have ever seen in 2D.’”
One of the big advantages of the film’s format is that viewers don’t necessarily need VR headsets to experience the film, although Deitz notes that this could change when the technology, namely VR headsets, eventually becomes cheaper. .
He recounted the opportunity to watch the film with other viewers using the headsets and how it aroused strong emotions. In one segment, a bright red balloon inflates inside a wooden cage until the material inflates well past the bars but does not burst, prompting comments from viewers about the loss, codependency, or restraint and inability to express emotions. Often, at the end, he said, the helmet was “soaked in tears”.
Film extracted from the video of “The Way” directed by Campbell Logan for the song of the new Manchester Orchestra album, Valley of the Vision. Courtesy of Campbell Logan and the Manchester Orchestra.
As an extension of using technology to enhance the album, the band also tapped director Campbell Logan to create a separate video for the track.”The patha song inspired by the battle that one of the band’s close family members lost to cancer. In the video, a hyper-realistic 3D character created in the Unreal Engine dances and swirls across a series of surreal backdrops.
“When I’m working on a music video, I like to get a copy of the song to meditate on, develop my own interpretation, check with the musicians about my interpretation, and then we spit out ideas,” Logan told Artnet News. . “For ‘The Way’, I listened to the song several times and one feeling kept coming back to me: being grateful for the grief. After realizing that, I talked to Andy about it and we agreed to follow that idea as the driving force behind the video.
Logan said their first project was to create an animated teaser for the record announcement, and the 3D character is based on the Stephanie Kim model that appears on the album cover.
“After he looked so pretty, we decided to make a music video based on the character. I took the images in my head and created an emotional puzzle that I was able to put together. I took emotional cues and created an arc that conveyed the feeling I was getting from the song. I made paintings of virtual environments and took the character through them on a cathartic journey.
Campbell Logan directed the music video for ‘The Way’, a song from the Manchester Orchestra’s latest album The Valley of Vision.
“The collaboration was quite fluid! I was inspired, I shared that inspiration with Andy, we figured out what we could achieve with time and budget, and I built it. It was cool for me to experiment with this medium for a genre of music that doesn’t often have videos that sound like this,” they said. “I think the song and the album are beautiful and I was aiming to incorporate our styles into something new. The whole thing was such a pleasure to work on.
And the fan reactions so far?
“It worked,” Hull said. “We didn’t want the film to take away the music and we didn’t want the music to take away the film. We didn’t want one stepping on the other; they kind of do this dance that really seems to keep people engaged. I think it’s just a lesson every time… you can’t rush certain things.
Manchester Orchestra is on tour with Jimmy Eat World throughout the summer performing music from The Valley of Vision live for the first time. Details on summer dates and tickets can be found here.
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