Danny Burke’s animated music videos make Mondrian-esque lines twitch and Pollock splats bounce with the beat. In “Fallen,” a music video for Meme, he layered time-lapses of ink blots resembling both Rorschachs and landscapes. This video (and one other) willdebut in theaters next week at the Minneapolis Film Festival,“At times I would identify specific drop shapes and growths that I thought worked particularly well and isolate and animate those sections,” Burke told The Creators Project. He stabilized each image in after effects, cleaned it in Photoshop, then put it into AfterEffects in a 3D space. But before the digital rigmarole, “I went through 20 or so canvases and dozens and dozens of sheets of paper,” Burke added.The second piece, “Brightest Star,” is made up of thousands of hand-painted canvases spliced together to evoke van Gogh’s night-focused work. Burke set up a canvas, painted a scene with acrylics, photographed it with a DSLR, then repeated the process. “Some of the scenes are actually different layers of paintings in 3D space in after effects, some are just one painting,” Burke explained. Though a couple of the images loop (the clouds, for example), most of the scenes are painted and photographed from start to finish.Meme is a passion project for the music duo, though they’ve landed songs in Gossip Girl and Jersey Shore. And in case you were wondering, they’ve had the name since Burke read Dawkins’ book, well before doge. Both the name and Burke’s painterly music videos show what’s DIY-able with the right inspiration and re-interpretation.
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