Keys to the Gate

A sixty-five second animation built in Maya, made as my own reading of the cover art for Keys to the Gate by death's dynamic shroud.wmv: a door standing alone in the dark, cables spilling out from behind it, coloured light coming off everything.

The original cover is a still, so the work was to decide what it does. I took it as a room and a camera rather than a picture: the piece opens on black, the door arrives lit around its edges in magenta and blue, and then the cables grow — first a few, then a mass of them, lights running along their length. Nothing else enters the frame; the tension is all in how much of the rig you can see at once.

Everything was built and rendered in Maya. The whole thing is one shot, which means the lighting had to hold up for the entire minute: the door reading as white without going flat, and the glow around it shifting colour without the scene ever getting bright.

The album and the original artwork are James Webster's — the composer and the visual artist behind it. This is an interpretation of that cover, not a replacement for it, and it's on YouTube where it can be watched at full size.