Time to wrap this album up. It's been in progress for far too long. The oldest song here, "Blue Demeanor", was finished in September 2021. And the latest, "Baloney", was finished last week.

I give you WIP.

(Work In Progress)

Bonus fact: six of the titles are puns related to the scale/mode use in that song. When there are no lyrics, what a song is about isn't always obvious, so titles don't mean much. Obviously, there's nothing about a Delorean in the instrumental "Delorian Dream", but it is in D Dorian. At one point, there was a concept to do all songs in modes of D (because D is really handy on a guitar neck).

At the time, I didn't know King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard used a similar concept for their fun 2022 album "Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava" - each song is in a different mode, and the first letter of each title identifies the mode.

This has been my project for the past month. The song took a week or so, and then the video took a solid two weeks in Blender, because Blender is a vast and puzzling and frustrating monster of an application that can do almost anything but doesn't give you any clue about how you can do anything so every step is a Google search.

Anyway.

[updated]

Please enjoy the salty grind of Smaller Animals' "Salt Lick":

This is what I learned Blender for.

I finished this song September 8 and then thought about what a video for it should look like for a couple of weeks. I eventually decided on something close to what you see here: a beach ball being bounced by mechanical paddles in front of a movie of the beach. Why would someone do that to a ball? Nobody knows.

I decided I needed to do that in a 3D animation app. Blender, being free, was the obvious choice. But Blender is an amazingly powerful application that is almost nothing like any application I've ever used. So the learning curve is immensely high. That's why it took my basically three months to do this scene.

The movie on the screen is made from videos of the beach I took with my phone at the end of September, and a few stills from other beach trips - that was all assembled into a single video separately in Blender.

The simple fact that I wanted to be able to see that movie projecting through the air means I had to use Blender's high-quality ray tracing renderer for this. "Suspended" used Blender's real-time renderer (in high-quality mode), which looks good, but the real-time renderer can't do the atmospheric effects needed to show light passing through cloudy air. So, while "Suspended" took a bit less than 4 hours to render two minutes, this took 102 hours to render these three minutes - 4900 frames, average of 75 seconds each. Once all the frames were rendered, I composed them and the audio into the final video, also in Blender.

The rendering process happens almost entirely on the GPU, and none of the other computers in my house have GPUs that can handle the requirements. And that's why I'm never going to fix anything in it, even though there is plenty I know I should fix.

Done!