Creating the Images

Just like Victor Kyam in the TV adverts in the 1980s who "liked the product so much" he "bought the company," I was so impressed with the fractal imagery I was able to produce with a variety of programmes that I bought a new high spec custom-built PC, solely to spend its life rendering these wonderful landscapes, synchronising music to the videos - and tweaking some images for printing.

Every image for each frame of the video is initially rendered at 1920x1080 pixels (Full HD). However, this is not large enough to produce a print of suitable quality, even when printing to only 32x22 inches. Each image selected for printing has to be enlarged and can take a few hours to render, even on a modern, power-hungry home PC. The prints are then carefully made to order by a 3rd party printer.

Every second of movie footage takes at least 30 frames to create the illusion of smooth movement. Each minute therefore takes @1800 frames. Whilst a large film company would have very many people and computers generating CGI simultaneously, this is impractical and prohibitively expensive for one person.

An animated section of only ten minutes can take a number of months to render on a PC running 24 hours a day for weeks at a time (and double that if re-rendering each frame for 3D applications). This is one reason why the animation project continues to be 'work-in-progress'. It has been a labour of love, but I feel the results so far have been worth it. Oh, and my electricity bill went up 78% in my first year of creating the video!

Accompanying Soundtrack

There are some 'tunes' in the video but, in order not to have the visuals merely accompanying a song - as is often the case with music videos - I have generally kept away from tunes and attempted to synchronise sound effects etc with whatever is happening onscreen for a more immersive and relevant visual experience. I have been producing music, including soundtracks to non-existent films, for many years in my humble home studio and I used some very basic skills along with many existing performance patches on both Korg and Yamaha outboard synthesisers, as well as a few self-created and internet-acquired samples, all of which were then synchronised to the visuals within Sony's Acid Studio on the custom-built PC.

If you would like to know more about fractals, please visit FractalForums.com or read the many tutorials online, such as: