Psalm 4:1
miniatures and neums
Unto the end, in verses. A psalm for David. (Psalm 4:1 DR)
I’ve been fascinated by both Medieval miniatures and early chant notation, and while I can’t hope to either create the former nor (at present) read the latter, I thought it’d be interesting to work them both into this .gif.
I came across this miniature while browsing for images of King David, and while the image of him caught my eye, it was the accompanying performer which sealed the deal. I couldn’t tell (and still can’t) if he has a bow (surely what it’s meant to be) or is playing the violin with a large knife or a sword.
Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter.
In the Divine Office the first verse of many Psalms is often omitted since it’s often a note about the ascription, the performance or something like that. I was tempted to follow a similar program, but decided to incorporate them anyway and see what sorts of interesting things could be created.
This one had me using the Content Aware Fill tool and some Clone stamping to be able to separate out the limbs. Tedious, but it was worth it. A little Puppet Tool in After Effects, run it through GIFGun and the verse is complete.
Enjoy.
Unto the end, in verses. A psalm for David. (Psalm 4:1 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: