Still Alive (cover)
Quarantine production
1 minute readStaying busy in lockdown
As soon as COVID-19 pandemic reached Seattle, WA, in the beginning of the quarantine we found ourselves unable to continue our planned band activities and decided to try something new. To record an acoustic cover remotely, because even though we have no means to record full drumkit, all other instruments at our disposal each of us could record at home. With the help and energy of our temporary member, Aidan, we present Still Alive.
Still Alive was originally composed and arranged by Jonathan Coulton for the closing credits of the 2007 video game Portal. It was performed by Ellen McLain, who portrayed an artificial intelligence and the game’s antagonist and subject of the song, GLaDOS.
We used the original arrangement as a start and modified it to accommodate violin and interpret the song with Kerr Ring vision. Aidan performed bass and piano, Lachlan added violin orchestration and Andrew recorded guitars. This record was also an experiment in audio production, edited and mixed by Olga and mastered by Andrew.
What are we looking at?
Speculative science theorizes that Kerr Ring singularities may act as portals to other spaces, times or universes, so what better object to represent a Kerr Ring cover of a song from Portal?
In the the video the viewer approaches a black hole and, after careful consideration, decides to make the leap through the event horizon.
The black hole, as well as the rest of the video itself, was generated from a single glsl shader, using Shader Toy. The Shader Toy shader “Black hole with accretion disk” by set111 was used as a base, and modified to be sound reactive, and its accretion disk split into blue and orange halves representing the blue and orange portals from the game. The scanline and warped data background were also added to evoke a sense of quantization. Lyrics and small touches such as glow were added in After Effects.
Huge thanks to Lachlan for directing and rendering this lyric video practically from scratch!