"Fractals? Again?"
YOUTUBE COMMENT
1596 AD. A ship is frozen in the deep arctic. No help is coming. The Navigators and Cartographers aboard, suffering from hypothermia and frostbite are starting to hallucinate. This is their Fractal Hallucination. 2014 By Julius Horsthuis Rendered with Mandelbulb3D music: “Soul Medicine” by Mari Boine, stretched with Paulstretch
Background
The globular structures with tubes sticking out is an often-seen phenomenon in fractals, usually associated with Julia mode. After iterating amazing surf a couple of times it also spawned all these thin wires,, which I thought looked super creepy. I tried to create a look that reminded of old copper, a little like 17th century technology, hence the crazy story I made up to accompany it.
A little story like this works though, because it sets you up for a specific mood. In 'solar wind' I've used the same story, set in the future, to evoke the same feeling, but here I rendered the story into the film. The 'fractal hallucination' seems a good way to describe this stuff. For the rest- the animation has some problems. The thin lines are not fit for frame blending, and it yields a lot of artifacts. Also, I think the ending is not as good.
This was my first experiment with 'Paulstretch', software that stretches music to an atmospheric soundscape. I used Norwegian (Sami) folk singer Mari Boine's beautiful voice to evoke that hallucinatory feeling.