Saul, Saul: Schütz as cathedral EDM
A voice from heaven calls a proud man by name. His horse throws him. Three days blind, then sunrise. Heinrich Schütz set it in 1650. Napkin Films made it cathedral EDM, and every note on screen is a note in the score.
Watch on YouTube. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich?
Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?
A proud man rides at night with a torch. A voice from heaven calls him by name. Again. And again. His horse throws him. He is blind for three days. Then something like scales falls from his eyes, and he gets up a different man.
Heinrich Schütz set that moment in 1650. Here it is again as cathedral EDM. A robot voice sings from the sky over a pipe organ and supersaws.
The idea
The words are from Acts. Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It will be hard for you to kick against the goads.
I didn't want a sermon. I wanted the shape of the story, because the shape belongs to everybody. You can be called by name. Pride rides high and falls. Fighting your own conscience only hurts you. You can be blind and then see. And the same lights can mean something new.
So every one of those is a picture. The persecutor's torches come back at sunrise as pilgrims' lanterns.
The first versions were empty
The early cuts were beautiful. Castles. Glass. Rivers of fire. And nothing happening in them.
My note was simple. It looks very cool and nothing is happening on screen to tell the story. We need the actors. We need the action.
So the Voice got a body. A dove of light that shines exactly as loud as the robot sings. At night its searchlight finds Saul on the shore every time it calls his name, and he stops. In the storm his horse literally kicks against a fence of goads, and it sparks. At the drop he falls, gets up into the light, and kneels in a rose window while the swans wheel around him. Then he's blind, hands over his eyes, until the scales fall as flakes of light.
And at sunrise he walks in. Off his high horse. On foot. Leading it.
The score
Every note on screen is a note in the score. The robot sings Schütz's own lines, and the words light up syllable by syllable as they're sung. The kicks, the crashes, the choir calls and the lightning bolts all land on the frame of their notes.
The music took the most passes. The first mixes were too busy. Too much noise under the words, and held notes that buzzed and grew louder. One of them sat right at 0:40 and wouldn't let go. The fix was a cold open that starts on the best part, a bed that ducks out of the way of the words, and silence between sung syllables that is actually silent.
The last pass added the beacon. One clean electronic line. It plays Schütz's violin where he wrote it, and where he wrote none it sings a melody built from his chords at that moment. In the run it climbs step by step into the drop. It ends on a cadence down to D.
The easter eggs
A P9 constellation in every night sky. A comet every fifteen seconds. Plan 9 peeking out of the castle's one lit window to see who is shouting. A road sign that says DAMASKUS 42 km. A helicopter towing a banner: SAUL, SAUL, CALL HOME. And a rubber duck on the lake that turns out to be a swan.
Each one has its own little synthesised sound, tuned to D, mixed under the music. Find them all.
The bookends
It opens on the first chord of the cold open played backwards, while a swan feather falls past the Napkin Films card.
It closes at sunrise. Plan 9 gives the moral of the story. Get off your high horse. Then Der Gouverneur says goodbye in Bavarian to the man who will go by Paul.
Pfiat di, Paul.
No horses were harmed in the making of this film. One fell over. He's fine.
Made on a laptop
No GPU. No stock footage. No image model. The animation is Napkin Films, the music is ChipForge, both written in Python.
| The piece | |
|---|---|
| Composer | Heinrich Schütz |
| Work | Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich, SWV 415 |
| Published in | Symphoniae sacrae III, 1650 |
| Written for | six soloists, two choirs, two violins and continuo |
| Text | Acts 9:4 and 26:14 |
| Edition used | James Gibb, CPDL #37195 |
| This version | cathedral EDM, 2:55 |
More from Napkin Films
- Toccata Rave, Bach builds the cathedral and Plan 9 breaks on the floor.
- Cantus Rave, an 800-year-old canon walks into a rave.
- Arp Cathedral, another cathedral, built from arpeggios.
- The Agent Said It's Done, a product keynote that turns into an anthem.
More in the Napkin Films catalog.
License
Film: CC BY 4.0. Remix it, repost it, drop it into your own thing. Credit "Napkin Films / Organic Arts LLC" and link CC BY 4.0. Engine code (Napkin Films, ChipForge) is GPL-3.0-or-later. ElevenLabs voice audio is licensed content and is not redistributed. Schütz is public domain. The edition is James Gibb's, CPDL #37195, under the CPDL License. Fantasia and Apocalypse Now are nodded to with affection. No footage or audio was used.
