One desk, one lamp, five songs. Memory of the Grid is the debut album of Rimela, an electronic artist who plays late-80s gear (Roland JX-10, PG-800, D-550). The music is about a memory that almost gets lost: copied to disc, the disc fails, and it survives on tape. I built the whole 11-minute album video as a single continuous film inside one Unreal room.
Full album: https://youtu.be/qQAU5wVW65c
The constraint
The set is a fixed 90s apartment desk (based on the Deko Matrix Demo apartment). I couldn’t swap props, so all the variety had to come from camera, lens, focus, light and what’s on the screens. That turned out to be the best rule of the project.
Workflow
- Beat grid first. I analysed the master WAV per song (86.6 / 119 / 118.8 / 126.5 / 101.3 BPM) and exported every beat and bar as frames at 24 fps. Those became marked frames in each song’s Level Sequence, so cuts, light changes and screen events snap to the music. Song 5 had been blocked at 76 BPM. The analysis showed it actually runs at 101.33 (76 is the dotted feel), so the whole sequence was retimed onto the real grid.
- One Level Sequence per song (SEQ_S1 to S5), with CineCameras on rails and handheld layers. Focus distance is calculated from the actual camera-to-subject distance. At macro distances the depth of field is under a millimetre, so focus typed in by hand never lands.
- Two eras, THEN and NOW. A post-process volume keyed per shot: THEN is warm, lifted and grainy; NOW is cool grey-blue and harder. The same desk becomes two points in time.
- Screens tell the story. The CRT carries the plot: “COPY MEMORY.MID > DISC 3”, “READ ERROR: DISC 3”, then “DISC 3 FAILED. COPYING FROM TAPE” until “MEMORY.MID 100% OK”. The film ends where it started: the room seen from the top, dark, with only the desk lamp still on.
- Python plus an AI assistant. Much of the Sequencer work (bindings, keys, retimes, marked frames) was scripted in Python through an editor MCP connection, with Claude doing the scripting and me directing and approving the shots.
- Rendering. 4K ProRes 422 HQ per song, TSR anti-aliasing, warm-up frames for the dust and steam particles.
- Edit in Premiere. The artist’s own footage of his hands on the synths and bass is cut in on the beat. Adjustment layers match it to the THEN and NOW looks, a short VHS glitch marks every cut between render and real footage, one grain layer runs over the whole film, and HUD overlays are motion-tracked onto the renders.
What I learned
- A locked set forces you to tell the story with camera and light, and that’s a good thing.
- Check the tempo with analysis before you block anything. A wrong BPM shows up as cuts that feel slightly late everywhere.
- In Sequencer, a key “on the beat” only works if your grid starts from the real first downbeat, not from 0.
Next step is a live show, where the same sequences get triggered by MIDI.
Visuals: g04t14///b · Music: Rimela