Bad Puns – A MoGraph Adventure #3

For this second ident to help promote our consultation service – us cartomancers have to do all our own marketing – I used Cinema 4D with the Turbulence FD plugin to run a fire simulation. FIRE. Wands. Instinct. Urge. Energy and Vitality. Sexuality. Power. Spirituality. Creativity. Inspiration. Libido and Self Esteem. The actual agenda. The deepest roots.

There is something very amusing, to me, about 10,000 years or more of evolution since neanderthal hominids learned to create and control fire for their own purposes to me sitting learning a 3D package running plugins to realistically simulate that most unusual plasma on a laptop with more computational muscle than was available for NASA to land men on the moon, or launch Voyager II out of the Solar System.

That’s Fire, also: smoulders for ever, safe and forgotten – suddenly bursts into ferocious activity or explodes unexpectedly. Never ignore it’s warnings. It’s dynamic is extreme. It can transport, inspire, transform. It can destroy, incinerate, or comfort. It is both the source and scourge of Pride. It can make you an extremist. Demagogoues trade in it. It is unpredictable, but follows clear rules.

Simulations, let me warn you, take a looooong ttiiiiimmmee tooooooo reeeeeennnnddeeerrrrrr. It’s simulating accurate physics, using fractal noise and clever shaders and things, but in the end I think you need more than a black (or mostly black) background to do it any justice, and a better computer to do the render…a fire needs more context, is what I’m feeling about the end result.

The music is a quick drum’n’bass 6/8 tune I knocked together after finding a cool synth patch on a Nord Lead 3 🙂

Still, I’m pleased with the animation. The stormy clouds in the background were all done in After Effects, as was all the explosion and electric effects plus 3D lettering (apart from the burning Tarosophia, which was Cinema 4D). There’s a fair bit of fine detail – some brief particle stuff with lightning, camera shakes, that kind of thing – that passes quickly but adds a lot. I like the cheesy pun, Sophia, SoFire…Tarosofire.

Plus, it is an important point to bear in mind: Divination is not to be taken lightly. It’s not a Game, nor a Con, but Something Else Entirely…
People can and do get burned. Tarot has a chthonic energy running all through it, as well as more Angelic and elevated currents of wisdom. It’s not afraid of it’s own Shadow. Some people really are though, not unreasonably, and such folk can trip over in various ways if not careful around tinkering with archetypes and deep psycho-spiritual structures as we do in Tarot…As Carl Jung pointed out, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of Light, but by making the darkness conscious”. (Emphasis added)

Prometheus, incidentally, stole fire from the Gods on Mount Olympus and gave it to Man – for which he was punished and suffered eternally at the hand of Zeus, not unlike the Garden’s Serpent who encouraged Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And we all know where that lead…

Advance, my fellow Sapiens, and tread firmly, but ever cautiously…

It is the True Will exploding the mind spontaneously

~ Aleister Crowley