Animusic DVD

DVD Features and Bonus Material:

• Seven completely different music animations
• Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound mix
• Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo mix
• Director’s comentary
• 16:9 widescreen version of “Pipe Dream”
• Animusic 2 sneak peak in widescreen
• Animusic’s first animation “Bevond the Walls* (1996)
• Art develooment slide shows for each main animation – includes production stills, screen shots, and sketches
• Unique Solo-Cam viewing (see below)
• Fold-out 3-panel menu structure diagram insert
• That adds up to 3 hours of material on the DVD.

A video jukebox of imaginative animations, each focused on a different complex Rube Goldberg-like music-making machine, ANIMUSIC provides a giddy visual feast of cause and effect orchestrations @ each filled with mood and vitality. One of those discs you find yourself reaching for, again and again.

Solo-Cam Angles show a single instrument from a fixed viewpoint. Use your remote’s Angle button to switch freely between up to 3 different Solo-Cam’s while an animation is playing.

ANIMUSIC
A Computer Animation Video Album

“Animusic: Special Edition” is a unique concept in entertainment. This highly imaginative DVD contains seven main musical numbers, but the concert venues are like nothing you have ever seen before. Even the famous “Star Wars” canting scene can not compare to what’s been put together here.

The conceit of this revolutionary set of music videos is that all the sounds are created by teams of preprogrammed instrumental robots. Headless guitars traveling on a solitary leg glide effortlessly along highly polished wooden tracks. A giant cathedral equipped with self-playing horns and drums creates full-bodied orchestration while shooting off its own lasers. And, in the selection “Pipe Dream” (truly a masterpiece), pool ball-sized spheres are fired noiselessly from pipes against stretched wire to produce one of the most mesmerizing numbers on the entire DVD.

None of the above does justice to any of the numbers described. Each of the seven is unique. both musicallv. and in its robotic and set design. None of them resemble an of the others in even the slightest detail, making each new cut something to inspect in detail.

And, there are plenty of details to inspect. Each of the seven main numbers has its own sub-menu allowing you to play the track, or to explore the following features: Art Development contains a slideshow featuring sketches from the design phase, screen snapshots of the instruments being modified, and early test renders for the project.
Stage Construction shows just that, the set and instruments for each animation being rapidly constructed piece by piece. One of the most unique features of the DVD, though. is the Solo Cam set-ups. which give the viewer the ability to view different instruments playing alone.
There are also bonus videos, easily found among the fully animated 3D menus. Some of the fun here rivals the best of the rest of the album, and unlike the bonus features on lots of film DVDs, these are not to be missed.

In fact, “Animusic itself is not to be missed. This is more than some time waster made for throwing in during meals and parties, or as something to babysit the tykes, this is a bold step forward in animation, a combination of existing art forms into something as uniquelv new and different as the Broadwav musical was when it first appeared.

C.J. Henderson
Author of “The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction Movies”