Quiet Steam

This was my second video for Peter Gabriel.  It’s based on a recursive, repeating pattern technique I’ve developed in After Effects over the years.   

This song is a remix of the more commercial single ‘Steam’ he released from his US album in 1993.  It was a sort of son-of-sledgehammer affair, but didn’t really cut the mustard I thought, but such are the commercial pressures on artists to have an MTV-friendly glittery pop release to help promote sales.

Anyway, ‘Quiet Steam’ was actually a B-Side remix released in the same year, a much darker, ambient affair, and a much better piece of music.  Years later I had been showing PG lots of experimental animation tests using my pattern repeating technique, and I was asked to come up with something for Quiet Steam.

An interesting approach I thought would be to take images out of the original video, and apply my technique to these, thus ‘remixing’ the video – creating lots of new spiralling abstract animation using the original video as source.  What I thought was unique is that both the song and the video were remixed into a completely new piece. 

The video is yet to be released/used anywhere, it doesn’t exactly scream top ten hit, but who knows, could end up as a DVD easter egg sometime in the near future.