Download Pack
This pack contains 205 VJ loops (98 GB)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/117080485
Behind the Scenes
Fractal fever! Honestly I both love and hate fractals. I love them because they are fascinating, beautiful, and surprising. I hate them because they are a pain in the ass to work with and they are so heavy to render out. And yet I get to experiment with an infinite geometry. So it makes sense that animating exponential functions is delicate business and finicky.
Masks are so useful when VJing. If you're using these videos for masking purposes and you feel that there are too many fine details within the fractal, then in Resolume you can apply the Dilate FX, change the Mode to Dark, and then set the Spread to your liking. This effect will hide the tiny details but keep the larger shapes.
It'd been a few years since I explored the various 2D fractal animation apps. So I installed a whole slew of them, tried them out, and I honestly wasn't impressed with any of them. I was about to give up when I realized that After Effects has a built-in Fractal FX and was pleasantly surprised with how well thought out it is and straightforward to animate. Also it included a black and white fractal style that was exactly what I was looking for. Although it doesn't utilize the GPU but that's somewhat manageable with my 16-core CPU.
I think a basic fractal zoom feels a bit stale. So I experimented with some techniques to liven it up. My first idea was to apply the Turbulent Displace FX to make the fractal feel like a liquid. And that got me thinking about how to make Moiré patterns with fractals. So I did another version where I layered up Turbulent Displace without keyframes, and then duplicated that layer, added some evolution keyframes to the Turbulent Displace to make it move a little bit differently than the other layer, and then tried out the Difference and Subtract blend modes. This was quite satisfying and reached the idea I had in mind.
I also played around with a bunch of FX in After Effects that I typically skip over and found that the CC Lens, CC Flo Motion, Twirl, and Paint Bucket did some interesting things. I've actually long wondered if something like Paint Bucket FX was possible in AE but didn't realize it was a built-in effect. Would love to see someone apply some feedback effects to these videos.
Originally I rendered out these videos at 3840x2160 @ 60fps using H264 and yet the whole VJ pack was over 400 gigabytes. Blarg! Fractals really are the true litmus test of a video codecs compression algorithm. So I tried rendering the videos using the HEVC codec, which helped with file sizes, but Resolume Alley cannot playback or convert an HEVC video. Come on Resolume devs! Please add HEVC support at least to Resolume Alley. So I had no choice but to downrez the videos to 1920x1080 @ 60fps. Turtles all the way down.
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