Dr. Innocous-Ketamoid Video/ Spring 2020
Full video
The 30-second abstract animation video is inspired by the song ‘Dr. Innocuous-Ketamoid’. It is an untraditional sound as music, and lacks a steady rhythm, giving it a very jarring and disconcerting tone.
Inspiration from Bon Iver’s music video
Inspiration from Kyle Cooper
I mainly drew visual inspiration from Bon Iver’s album art and music videos, which are collaborations with Eric Timothy Carlson— he uses a lot of strange symbols and collage against scenic photos and videos. Another large visual influence for the video was Kyle Cooper’s work for Se7en, and its eerie, glitchy key visuals. He does an amazing job in this title sequence, setting up the disturbing and irregular tone of this film with his unique typography.
Process scans
During the image making process, I defined the energy of the song as three words: jarring, disconcerting and futuristic. These keywords led me on the mission to find the main visual voice of the video. I explored several mediums such as stamping, hand painting and scanning to abstract mundane items. Black, white and red were the key colors throughout the video, and repetitive patterns demonstrate the constant repetitive sounds of white noise during the song. I experimented with typography to abstract the title “Dr. Innocuous-Ketamoid”. The typeface, Courier, was a futuristic choice for its time, being adapted for the IBM typewriter. It was altered in a jarring and disconcerting tone to match the static sounds of the song.
Process sketches
While story-boarding the final images, I had put together an ‘alien’ narrative, a sense of other invading a space. The final product communicated the three words (jarring, disconcerting and futuristic) that I started off with when first venturing into this project. The imagery, from collaging to stamping matched the tone of the song as they were visually static-like, moving perfectly to the non-beat of the song.
Still from final video