A Visual Exploration Into Jazz is a collaboration between DV Studio: designer and director Jay Vaz and motion designer Lawrie Miller – who met in university and have created together for the last ten years – and the filmmaking duo Twin, also known as the Inglis Twins. Featuring UK jazz drummer Mackwood, the short film lives up to the title – the creative team wanted to explore the melodic terrains of rumbling, frenetic jazz drums by assigning certain shapes to different sounds, exploring how we visually interpret the sounds of the bass, the snare, the cymbals through the arrangement of graphic elements. The result is something that is playful, lively and filled with a love for the lawlessness of jazz music.
Evoking an imaginative visual style, with music turning into colours and shapes, the creative team used a wide angle shot “as a canvas” to paint bleeping graphics all around Mackwood as he plays. At first, the team explored ways to automate the animations, but eventually the majority of animations were laboriously manual. When it was done by hand, it added a tactile relationship to the music, a hair of a second out of place in one direction or another – which is very jazz-like, after all; human, improvisational, reactive. “We approached the visuals with the same flexibility of making custom, instinctive decisions. When the animation becomes too rigid, the synchrony between the audio and visuals can feel forced rather than natural for the viewer,” says Lawrie.
Inspired by the usual suspects: jazz legends such as Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, Dorothy Ashby and Pharoah Sanders, the short film was driven by alternative music, rhythms that bounced in and out of the standard 4/4, almost impossible to visualise, especially the “outer-planetary” sounds of Sun Ra.