I was inspired to make this based on the fractal image I created two weeks ago titled blood_tower.
I purchased a piece of music I like and thought was fitting to the darker theme of this piece. Lorn - Oxbow B.
If you're interested you can find the song and others by Lorn here: https://lorn.bandcamp.com/track/oxbow-b
The process began within Mandelbulb 3D by creating a zooming loop of the tower like structure.
I rendered out a black & red version, a greyish version and the Z Buffer.
This was done over two nights seeing as rendering 3840x2160 for 2x Antialising at 1080p takes a toll on your CPU.
The Loops were then opened within Adobe After Effects where I applied the plugin Twixtor to slow the zoom loop down to 50% speed.
This saves me time from rendering out twice as many frames in MB3D.
All 3 layer types including the Z Buffer were slowed and reversed to zoom inwards instead of outwards.
The grey scale Z Buffer was used for masking various effects so I could isolate them to the background or foreground of the structure.
I made use of the technique known as Datamoshing for two of the transitions within this visualization.
The first of which was Iframe Removal and the latter Pframe copying.
This requires the external program Avidemux to 'break' your video and VLC Media Player to turn it back into a playable MP4.
There's a tutorial for this effect here if you're interested: Datamoshing tutorial
This glitchy effect is gaining a lot of popularity these days in music videos.
I'm quite fond of it and will be exploring this a lot more in future vids.
The synchronized effects were achieved by changing the opacity of various layers and were keyframed in using some scripts linked to the kick and snare of the track.
There's yet another tutorial for this here: Audio Synchronized effects
Here you can see how quickly things get out of hand when making these sorts of edits.
I could have cleaned up my workspace more but as long as it's messy-functional I'm okay with it.
Aaaaaand that's pretty much it folks.
Please share any relevant thoughts or content you have in the comments.
I'm also interested in working with other content creators so let me know if that's you.