Watch this! Bai Hei 北海

[jesse_the_k]

This surrealist and psychedelic video features photographic scenes of South China invaded by fierce transformative spaceships, self-propelled dragon kites and maybe-sentient balloons. The original music combines drunken vocals, Chinese lute, and EDM. I felt delightfully wrong-footed, disconnected from space and time.

(No captions needed; if you can describe this plotless shiny video in comments, go for it!)

Bei Hai / 北海‬ (animation Rob Jabbaz. music Howie Lee) from Rob Jabbaz on Vimeo.

http://www.robjabbaz.com has more animations.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

(why did I click the post button instead of the pause button? the world will never know.)

Photo-realistic foggy terraces of South China, with chiming traditional music.

Title card.

Zoom in on an apparently terra-cotta legged pot with a pointed roof. Which abruptly disappears into the group with a poof, and with a video-game electronic noise, the earth opens up to release a 3D model floating ship that seems to have come from an early video game: every surface is faceted with polygons, with a face at the front and two cannons which emit glowing objects. The music turns decidedly 8-bit video game, and a second face-ship pops up. The faces are painted in brightly colored patterns like a Chinese Opera mask, each with a different pattern. The animation and music glitch, and the wireframe of the face-ship glows into visibility for a moment. A third ship joins them.

They release hundreds, thousands, of little red floating lanterns, as they and the music continue to bubble and glitch. The lanterns rise into the sky in drifting patterns, forming great circles in the sky as the face-ships swoop over the landscape. The circles light with lightning-spark energy and become three portals which let through larger and more complex face-ships with elaborate headdresses and long beards.

The music gains in complexity and richness with the new detail. The new ships crackle with energy and begin emitting things. One lets forth waves of sparkling red energy. One grows curved graspers. The third is wracked with lightning and two dragons like shiny faceted bead necklaces grow from it.

Two dragon-shapes spiral through a hole in the clouds which reveals the sun shining serenely down.

Black card transition.

The large face-ships drift above the still waters of a lake, with the dragons coiling around them. The gentle xylophone music and image glitch gently. A boat rows below the dragons as they skim the surface.

The undulating dragons form the shape of an immense dragon-ship, which comes into being wireframe first, naturally, gaining solidity as the smaller dragons writhe around each part of it.

The dragons attend upon the immense dragon-ship in chiming, sparking glitches.

The music is calm, and the large face-ships float lazily among the clouds, with a dragon gently sparking as it swirls.

End.

[jesse_the_k]

EPIC!

Wow.

That's as amazing as the video itself. Take a bow!

[azurelunatic]

Thank you. It's good to know that the past four years of intermittent audio transcription have paid off some!

[luzula]

Huh, pretty and weird. For some reason I was convinced that the floating faces were letting out sinister von Neumann machines that would multiply and take over everything.

[jesse_the_k]

And maybe they will! This vid only gets creepier on rewatch. I love how it combines a very specific artistic sensibility while being abstract enough that the viewer can contribute too.

[jazzyjj]

Believe it or not I'm just getting back to this now. My schedule as of late has been rather hectic. But anyway, I wasn't able to watch this in Safari because my stupid Flash Player was out of date and there's no way that I know of to update it accessibly. So just a few minutes ago I tried the video in Google Chrome and low and behold it worked. These descriptions are spot on, and remind me of those done by the other professional narrators whom I've heard describe movies and other things. Awesome job!

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for the feedback! All credit goes to azurelunatic!

[azurelunatic]

Thank you.