Lifeforce’s soundtrack began pretty late in the creative process. This time we wanted to have more than just an idea of what the visuals were going to look like. When we saw the magnitude of the scenes it was clear that we had to go in a different direction with the music while at the same time try to maintain some of our trademark sounds and progressions.With Memento Mori we went overboard with attention to detail. The track utilizes more than 2000 samples and over 100 rack devices on Reason, which eventually managed to get a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 HT CPU cry for mercy, as it could not replay the sounds in realtime.

The end result proves to be a lot more melodic and sentimental than our previous tracks, more coherent as a whole and with a tighter beat and emotional synch. We did not include traditional progressive rock elements such as variating time signatures and syncopated rhythms and riffs this time as we felt that the flow of the demo called for a more “swimmy” (as we call it) soundtrack-ish approach. As with the visual part, the song explores the circle of life from birth to death,even if through dramatic circumstances reminding everyone, as per the title, that they are mortal. As the demo (and life) closes to the end, the sound gets rougher and more agressive, portraying the multiplying aspects in a person’s life until his lifeline is cut short , perhaps before its time. The dance segue, seemingly detached from the whole, is a friendly nod to those who understand that life should not be taken too seriously all of the time.

With Lifeforce we wanted to make a demo that has a progression and a cyclic narrative. It starts where Iconoclast, our Assembly 2005 demo, ended: we enter into the mind of the creator / avatar / muse (a small reference to Homer here) and descend into the beginning of the journey of life. The images of nature and the laughter o f children are the starting point. Like some other parts in this demo the happy and playful mood is interrupted by sorrowful events (knife slicing the rainbow). The sequence that follows (tree submerged in liquid, bubbles floating towards the surface) is the progression to maturity and the passage of time. The character tries to climb the mountain in vain and extends his arm to reach for the beating heart - the symbol of youth.The images that follow (statue of men reading the scribes, bells ringing in the distance) are a reference to religion, seemingly the last resort of some men in the dusk of their lives. The second part of the demo begins in the bathroom sequence. The man has died but left a message: “ZEI”, which means he/she/it is alive. A message of hope, maybe ? The black strips and octopuses represent the fear of death and guilt. The strips guide us through a series of surealistic images that overlap one another: images of living things that exist in the domain of the living (city, horse,elephant,clown). We wanted to create a feeling of anxiety before the revelation of the last scene in which we have drawn a full circle: The desert is revisited, only now, after innumerable years it is an ocean, deep and dark. The crescendo slowly builds to a nuclear blast that engulfs our world and memories. We too now sink down and contemplate our own mortal fate.

Lifeforce, like all ASD demos, is almost completely hand made; which means that apart from some static models and textures all model animation, particle effects, post processing, camera paths, synchronizations and everything else that makes this demo has been hard-coded. We believe that it is impossible to deliver a demo of the complexity of lifeforce by using an available demoscripting engine and putting in less work than hard-coding it the way we did in the first place. The code in Lifeforce is based on a very minimalistic 3D engine (a combination of all first 20 or so NeHe tutorials, for example, is a superset of our 3D engine) and heavy use of image processing and shaders.

The demo was written exclusively on an Athlon 3000XP with a geforce FX 5600 ultra.

Lifeforce is our latest demo, which won the 1st place at the ASM’07 combined demo competition..but you can’t read about it here yet. The reason is that all group members have been caught up in a celebratory cruise on a small ship in the bermuda triangle, which has had some strange effects on them all…amusic is stuck on the bridge, still suffering from color intoxication, amv has to stand guard on a never-ending midwatch,  while ch3 and leviathan are still trying to make up an excuse to get out of navis telling them how great the party was, down in the lower decks.  So while we’re -forcefully- looking for the life-boats, I”m going to give you this link, so you can download the prod and comment on the demo at the same time!

Our contestant in the Intel-demoscene competition for 2007 has been released! Get it here

The change of season marks a change of pace : Not only are we set for the Intel Demo competition on the 1st of July, but we are also heavily working on what we hope will be one of our most massive productions yet. Stay tuned!

Stella has arrived! Congratulations Navis and Lisa!