Making of: behind the scenes of the Double Sun video one year after its release

On June 25^th 2018, Double Sun was released: in 12 months, the first single of The Space Violin Project reached 200,000 streams on Spotify, over 400,000 video views via the various platforms, with all the developments that the song and its images have gone through during this time. 

COMMANDER AJ

Many of you tell me you want to know more about the Space Violin, about how my “lightning bow” works, how I handle doing so many dates, trips and music… in short, your curiosity is vast and across the board. I hope to answer some of your questions by summing up how the Double Sun video was created, thus launching the whole The Space Violin Project, which, just as a reminder, you can find here at this link https://www.andreacasta.com/tsvp/ 

I met Lorenzo Gubinelli in the autumn of 2017: a talented illustrator with an international style. Through the use of his drawing pen, we began to characterize Commander AJ, my alias in the future, expressing in the strength and poetry of a drawing all the dreams that I carry within me and narrate through my music; this character then transforms my “human” lights and shadows into the strength to travel time and space, beyond the frontier of humanity. I want to emphasize that Lorenzo’s involvement came after a period of almost 2 years in which we worked on texts, ideas and musical demos, all processed thanks to my precious “teacher”, author and creative director Monica Codena. 

Here are some preliminary projects and the final result: the cover.

We immediately thought that an illustrated representation and the “real Commander AJ” should narrate the story to one another, as if looking in a mirror: a feature that is present for the entire duration of the project. This is why, with the aid of set designer Luca Filaci, we created a backdrop that reproduces the “Space Violin lab”, the bunker-laboratory where AJ prepared his mission, where he will return, and from where, therefore, both his visions of the future and his memories of the past are born.

The rest was created from the talent of Nicolas Vanegas Sanchez – video maker, and Piero Perilli – director and editor, with whom we found a way to merge the “flesh and blood” shots with the animated sequences. You can review the result here https://youtu.be/mqJQvF4YXKg

Other stories arrived after Double Sun, and now Commander AJ, thanks to his fantastic outfit created by KB Project, actually materializes on the stages of great Festivals and clubs. In the next video, illustrations and reality will dialogue even more intensely, beyond the speed of light, and for this we used green screen, special effects and other visual solutions that, like my music, draw inspiration from the 80s and are re-proposed with our own “digital taste”. What do you think? What is your

favorite science fiction saga? We all continue to look up towards the stars, as we wait for the 50th anniversary celebrations of man’s first landing on the moon (20 July 1969). But we’ll talk about this in the next posts.