This symbolic piece represents the unnatural habits we find ourselves hard to break away from, and our weakness to control its effects. Desensitized to the harshness of reality, we carry on with our artificial lives. We can sense that our only Eden is dying, but we're too tied up to try and save it.
"Eden" is a music video that I directed for the British progressive metal band TesseracT. The video was produced by Escape Plan Productions and was filmed at College Station in Texas. Here's an official witeup about the video from the band's record label - Century Media.
"Empyrean" is a music video that was inspired, conceptualized and created entirely from personal dreams. It was developed with Jonny Greenwald (Co-Producer & Director of Photography) at the Dept. of Visualization, Texas A&M University under the artistic guidance of Prof. Karen Hillier. Read More →
One of the most visually arresting videos of the year so far Heavy Blog is Heavy
Most of these visual concepts came to me in several dreams over the past few years. And it urged me to create a visually striking and intriguing cinema that captured the bizzare emotions I had felt during the dreams. I merged the vital elements from my favorite dreams, consciously making an effort to retain their inherent abstractness.
I discovered a certain connection to my cultural background in Hinduism in the imagery within the dreams, such as the lotus, the trio formation, their motions etc. and I concentrated on them and used them as a source of inspiration for successive visual and artistic choices.
Musically, I wanted to create a mood piece with atmospheres and heavy guitars that would blatantly revoke the emotional states from my dreams. I approached this by layering several ambient instruments and soundscapes, and then accented it with subtle vocal sweeps. Then I carefully wrote a simple melodic motif on a low octave of the guitar, which is central to the piece.
The result I feel has a certain surreal incline, and gives the audiences' minds an opportunity to wander into mine.
Awesome video, and a great tune as well! Amos Williams, TesseracT
During the four months of preparation and experimentation for the shoots, we mainted a very active blog and constantly posted detailed reports of our tests and progress.
I became obsessed with Carl Sagan's Cosmos and started having dreams about space travel and visiting planets. I set out to transform these dreams into music with retro-sounding synthesizers and distorted guitars. This album is a direct result of that experiment.
Wave Origami was sporadically recorded through-out the year of 2010. It was made on my MacBook with Garageband, Guitar Rig and plenty of AU plugins. The guitar used is my Jackson JSRR30 tuned down to standard B.
I accidentally recorded myself gagging and coughing, and I felt it had an interesting ring to it. So I developed some beats and a bass-line around it. The resulting mix was unnerving and it brought to my mind an image of lovers choking and kissing at the same time. This image inspired me to write and record a simple repetitive vocal line with the words "I, want, more, you." Later, I recorded myself dancing to this piece of music. I processed the footage in Adobe After Effects and instinctively played with it, trying to make it look like there were several persons in the video.
The sound of a single electric guitar is processed in realtime to create complete musical pieces. A sound generative system feeds off the guitar to create drum loops, ambient sounds and accompaniment to the guitar. The system also generates visuals that are greatly drawn from my personal style of artwork. This is a work in progress. It is the thesis for my Master's Degree. Watch me give a hasty presentation on this here.
This Max/MSP application behaves like an effects pedal for an electric guitar where the tonal qualities of the guitar are mapped to colors, e.g. gain-hue, reverb-saturation etc. The system also provides a tool for painting, where the characteristics of the brush are controlled by the performance on guitar.
The audience plays with brightly colored objects (gloves, balls, toy swords, wands etc.) while looking at themselves in a rear projected screen that acts like a mirror. A video camera placed next to the screen captures their actions and a Flash application generates super-hero-movie style lightning, smoke and fire effects using the colored objects as cues and composites them over the captured video in realtime, which is then projected on the screen.
Various typographic parameters of a simple slab-serif font are coded into gene strands to create a gene pool. The system starts off with a set of randomly generated fonts from which the user selects the ones with the most favorable characteristics by giving them star ratings. Fonts with higher ratings pass on their genes to the next generation of fonts. With each generation the fonts get closer to the user's demands.
A random set of points are mapped to form a curve, which is duplicated on a radial axis. Multiple iterations of this process are layered up to create intricate patterns. Asymmetric patterns can be achieved by perturbing the axes of radial symmetry and independently scaling each segment to create interesting looking variations.
This was developed as part of course work at the Dept. of Visualization with a team of five graduate students in association with DreamWorks Animation. The piece was developed from concept to completion in ten weeks, and was presented at SIGGRAPH 2008
In 2008 I developed a keen interest for rigging, and decided to explore it by creating a Tyrannosaurs Rex in Maya. I developed this under the guidance of Tim McLaughlin. And my objective was to understand joint placement, its limitations, then create an accurate rig and a walk-cycle animation with believable deformations. I developed a MEL script that would generate the entire rig given a set of locators indicating joint positions. Here's a skeletal study that I did before implementing the final rig.
Dinosaurs, especially the T-rex was perhaps my biggest childhood-obsession, and working on this project let me relive those childhood memories. I also ended up going to the
This piece is about a countdown to insomnia, greatly inspired by the students working in the VizLab. These sleep deprived students, high on caffiene work all-round the clock on their pixel-pretty CG animations. All in an effort to meet the industries' expectations and finally land a job in a big production house. Read more →
I walked into the lab on a busy night and decided to capture the mood. I shot a good friend of mine as he worked through the wee hours on a project that was due the next morning. The shoot happened impulsively, and I used a simple point-and-shoot camera that I carried in my backpack at the time. I relied on my instincts for the whole process and remained unobstrusive to my friend's working process.
The piece was entirely done with 100 still photographs, no videos were shot or used in the making. The numeric-forms that flash in-between are purposefully arranged found objects from the lab and were later used in creating sounds for the piece.
I recently worked with The Nocturnal Chaos, mixing and mastering their debut EP and contributing ambiences and playing guitar on the album's final track "Brighter Future". They have released a music video for this track, directed by Nicolas Demousseau, Skyn Production
The Body Orchestra interactive installation was exhibited at the annual Fall Show at the Dept. of Visualization Texas A&M.
I was recently required to give a 3 minute talk on my research/art work here at the Dept. of Visualization, Texas A&M University. Here's a video of my presentation.
I'll be directing the next music video for British progressive metal band - TesseracT. The video will be produced by Escape Plan Productions, shot at College Station in Texas. Behind-the-scenes for the project will be posted online soon. Read full article at Century Media.
I was recently interviewed by Tim Williams of Musings of a Djentleman. The interview revolves around Empyrean, and future plans.
I have started working on my debut music-video album "Forbidden Circle". It will feature nine tracks, and will be accompanied with music videos. Empyrean will be one of it. Several musicians are collaborating with me on this project including Igor Omodei & Matthieu Romarin from Uneven Structure, David Maxim Micic, Jakub Zytecki, Patrick James of Dawn Heist, Tom Still of Invocation, Grayson Cain etc. More will be announce soon.
My first music video has been released, and is now available on Vimeo and Youtube. Several music blogs have published it including Got-Djent? and Heavy Blog is Heavy
Ganesh Rao (b. 1984, India) is an artist, director and musician based in College Station, Texas. He received a Bachelor of Science and Engineering Degree from Manipal University in 2006, and he is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts Degree at Texas A&M University. Over the past decade, Ganesh has worked with several visual, aural and digital mediums. He has directed and developed collaborative projects from concept to completion, such as Empyrean (2011), which is an independent music-video that he produced and directed for his own music. Ganesh focuses on combining artistic intuition and technology to create aesthetic and organic pieces like Typolution (2008), which generates slab-serif fonts by using genetic algorithm, and Synesthetic Guitar (2009), where the sound of a live performance on guitar controls the movement of a virtual brush. He also designs sounds, composes music for short-films and visual projects. Ganesh is currently directing Eden, a music video for the British progressive-metal band, TesseracT. He is also working on his second music album Forbidden Circle (2012), which will feature collaborators from USA, UK, France, Sweden, Serbia and Australia.
