Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley

When the lights dim and the conductor raises his baton, you know there's going to be magic in the air. The first note plays, and you embark on a journey into a new world full of contagious energy and breathtaking storytelling. You take in the music of the flutes, violins, cellos, and... a pencil?

Wait, what's that doing there?

That's what Amber Kempthorn wanted red point to help her capture through the animated piece, Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley.

The Client

Amber Kempthorn is a working visual artist native to the Akron area and has spent the last decade teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the College of Wooster. While she has received degrees in both studio art and sculpture, her main medium is drawing. Her art has been exhibited across the country, including the Front International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. She feels that drawing tends to be overlooked in the world of art because it's not loud and grand, but it's the most accessible form since we all draw in one way or another.

"As long as you know how to write your name with a pencil, you can have some relationship with what it is to record with this tool."

Kempthorn uses her art to capture the extraordinary in everyday objects by placing them "weirdly" within landscapes you wouldn't find them in otherwise to activate the viewer's sense of time and space. In her art, the human is implied to give the viewer access to this new perspective on their own terms.

The Project

Being an avid pursuer of culture in all forms, Kempthorn's other passion is music, from rock to classical. Years ago, she first heard Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes" and was particularly struck by "Moonlight". Since the interludes are scene changes for a larger opera, there's a narrative edge to the piece that made the individual instruments sound like flight and transformation to her. She imagined a moon moving across the sky, and she had an idea to animate what she was "hearing visually." 

When it was time for submissions to the annual Knight Arts Challenge, Kempthorn approached the Akron Symphony Orchestra with the idea of creating an animation to accompany ASO's live performance of "Four Sea Interludes." Now all she needed to do was figure out how to animate it.

That's when Kempthorn found red point. She wanted to work with a studio who was based in Akron because it was important to her that the entire project was done with local talent. In addition, red point had also previously won a Knights Art Challenge, so we knew how to help her navigate the process. She approached red point's owner Eric Vaughan and graphic designer Tony Samangy with the idea, and as she played the music and explained the story, Vaughan and Samangy became just as excited about the concept as she was.

Even though it was the first grant she had ever written, Kempthorn won the 2019 Knight Arts Challenge.

It was go time!

Pre-Production

Once the project received the green light and the funding was in, we were able to get started!

Kempthorn put together the script and storyboards for Ordinary Magic, which consisted of four separate animated videos to accompany each of the interludes. She presented the storyboards to our animation team, and we were able to map out a plan with the list of 3D assets she wanted to include.

We began to move forward by taking her illustrations that had been digitized with a high-resolution scanner, and then, we used Adobe Photoshop to touch up, color correct, and crop the images. After all that was done, we could finally bring the artwork in to Adobe After Effects and begin animating.

Post Production

Kempthorn had specific ideas for each of the interludes, so we went in order of the interludes when animating each piece, which helped streamline the process and navigate the beats we wanted the animations to hit. 

What was interesting and especially fun about this project was syncing up the music to each piece, and we knew that we needed to time up certain "characters" like the moth and the light bulb with certain instruments to highlight the personality of the character and the music. We had a great time playing with the composition of certain objects within the videos, and whether it was by coincidence or Kempthorn's artistic intuition, we later found that certain placements fell in line with the Akron Symphony Orchestra's layout, like the light bulb in "Dawn" and the violins both sitting on the right side of the stage.

Challenges

Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley was one of our most unique projects since it was an artistic passion project rather than company or product branding. It allowed us to stretch our artistic muscles that you don't always get to use when working on a more technical project, but that doesn't mean that there weren't any challenges along the way.

One of the first challenges we faced was beginning the project just before the pandemic. We had gotten into a good zone where Amber would come in to the studio for weekly meetings to go over the animations and give feedback. Once the pandemic hit, it became a challenge at times for Kempthorn to describe the music and how she wanted the characters to move. We were able to overcome this through detailed communication until we were able to have in-person meetings once again.

Another challenge both our team and Kempthorn faced was learning how to communicate with each other on what Kempthorn wanted the project to become. Being a visual artist, Kempthorn had the artistic verbiage but needed to translate what she wanted into animation terms for our team. We worked with her to find what she wanted by narrowing down the problem and by giving creative suggestions to help her find what she was really asking for. Before we knew it, we all found our rhythm with each other and creatively problem solved our way through the project.

After years of hard work and working through the pandemic, Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley premiered with the Akron Symphony's performance of Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes at EJ Thomas Hall on October 15, 2022. 

Results

Even though our team watched the tech rehearsal with Kempthorn the night before, we were all blown away watching it come to life opening night. The synchronization between the music and the animations was better than we could have ever hoped, and one would think that the conductor's baton was summoning these objects and bringing them to life on screen. Vaughan pulled Kempthorn aside and told her that "It looks like the music was made for your work" rather than the other way around, and it's safe to say that was a universal feeling throughout the night.

Kempthorn expressed to us that her goal for this project was to bring more people to classical music and Benjamin Britten's work, but most importantly, to show people the magic of the orchestra's live performance.

"This is the beauty of what being an artist is. Frankly, if we listen to our artists—or read them or watch them—then what we have is an opportunity to see a new dimension or a different perspective of something that we may already know and be deeply familiar with."

For us, it was certainly an unforgettable night watching our work be accompanied by such a powerful live performance after spending months working with a recorded version. Our lead animator Dave Hayward, who spent the most time bringing Ordinary Magic's animations to the finish line said:

"It was a very fulfilling experience to see the product you helped create in a theatre with a live orchestra. A bucket list type of experience."

Kempthorn's next step is to find other orchestras in the area to perform Ordinary Magic to continue her mission to bring more people to classical music and the magic of the live performances. Until then, while we can't recreate how it feels to watch this live in a case study, enjoy the animation trailer accompanied by the English Symphony Orchestra below!