The History of Jazz, Animated in Shadow Art

What five rooms and bleeding-edge software have to do with the cultural heritage of music.

We love, love, love jazz. And we have a soft spot for good animation. So we’re all over Silhouettes of Jazz — a brilliant animated short film from SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, outlining the history of jazz in a virtual shadow art museum.

Shadow art is a unique form of sculptural art that exploits the fact that we can recognize objects from their shadows or silhouettes. Improvisation, a key ingredient of jazz music, is mirrored in the ambiguity of a shadow sculpture: many different 3D shapes can cast the same 2D shadow.

The film focuses on five milestone eras in the evolution of jazz — the early music of field workers, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, swing, and bebop — each represented by a separate room, in which 3D sculptures cast complex shadow images in different directions simultaneously, making each form interpretable as multiple symbolic objects.

The animators used a novel computational method, building 3D shadow volumes through global geometric optimization that allows the artist to later edit the silhouette using 3D modeling tools.

Silhouettes of Jazz does for jazz what This Is Where We Live did for book publishing, a visual and conceptual delight from start to finish.

Thanks, @TrackerNews

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

History, Animated, Quick and Uneuphemistic The moon hoax, why Nixon lost the debate, and what dinosaurs have to do with Gerald Ford and a chicken. Despite our general dismissal of history as a boiling pot of mistakes that humanity never learned from, we have to admit it offers a great and telling tale or two....
Infoviz Education: Animated Visualizations for Kids Excellent examples of infoviz-driven animation that aims to educate and engage the younger set....
The Jazz Loft Project 40 years later, W. Eugene Smith's fascinating photographs and tapes of the New York jazz scene at the dilapidated lofts of 821 Sixth Avenue are brought to light....
Lennon’s Brain Animated 39 years after sneaking into John Lennon's hotel room to get an interview, Jerry Levitan offers the legend's words as brilliant animation scored by Lennon's voice....
Before OK Go: The History of Rube Goldberg Machines Where today's trend of domino-effect, object-based-chain-reaction video technique actually originated....

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 11:04 am in culture, design, film, music and was tagged animation, cool, culture, design, music.