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this got me thinking; where do people get their inspirations and ideas for their prods?

For me the inspiration often comes from different movies, music videos, books, wikipedia and my subconscious. I try not to directly ”copy” anything unless I want to make a veiled (or direct) shout-out, but sometimes i’ve realized after the fact that my subconscious was totally ripping off something and presenting it to me as an original idea.

A couple of examples of the main sources of (direct or indirect) visual inspiration for some newer mfx demos, in no particular order. These are by no means exhaustive lists of sources, but more like the ”most obvious” ones in these demos:

The Interloper - The music videos of OK Go, and the music of Muse. The flying particle worm thingy probably came from the smoke monster in Lost. I also wanted to learn Blender.

Asura - The works of Douglas Trumbull, especially the ”universe” / ”lacrimosa” sequence in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.

Breach - Concrete brutalism in general, and on a subconscious level Control by Remedy, which i realized after the fact; I played the game in 2019, made the demo in 2025, replayed the game this August and went ”goddammit, subconsciousness!”.

Abomination - You really don’t want to go there, but one detail (the black eyes) was inspired, again thanks to my subconsciousness, by a deodorant brand I randomly switched to about a month before Revision.

The Proud Flesh - You _really_ don’t want to go there either… (suffice to say i was still recovering from a surgery when making that demo, and the wound wasn’t healing properly)

Cathodoluminescence - No single source of inspiration as this was my first foray into Cables, but you can find references to a ton of stuff here (the soundtrack featured samples both from Event Horizon and the _good_ US remake of Godzilla from 2014, and there are visual shout-outs to Neon Genesis Evangelion and David Lynch’s version of Dune amongst other things). Techno clubs were also a major inspiration.

Radioluminescence / Bouncer / 24 Hour Party People / International Garage+ / Hypnosis / With Pride - The loose group of demos V3nom affectionally calls ”The Berlin Series”; These are all basically inspired by various nights spent at techno clubs in Berlin, and most specifically the small Neukölln club Sameheads.

Euphrates / Tigris / Bunker / Hydra / Paradise - Water & Techno

So… where do _you_ get your ideas? How do you distill them into a final product? Do you have examples to share?

most of my minimalartifact work was based on nihilism, depression and introspection. trying to express it audiovisually.

for the less introspective projects it's been mostly picking a random silly concept that no one would make a demo about and trying to push the absurdity into something funny or interesting. usually with some sort of story telling surrounding the absurd scenario.

helping others achieve their vision can also be fun. and require some empathy of sorts to get onboard with whatever idea/aesthetic they are trying to pull off and not ruin it with opposing/tacky/cliché suggestions.

also made some demos where we just look at pool of resources we have unused for a long time or randomly made recently (be it tracks, samples, videos, effects or unused graphics) and try to find a story / common element that might glue it together and make something greater then the sums, without seeming forced together. sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. so the inspiration comes from the remnants of the active team mates in those cases.

Cool stuff. Thanks for sharing! Do you have some external ”go-to” sources for visual aesthetic inspiration? Specific artists or styles you turn to for example?

For +1-1 I was inspired by 2000 netart like jodi and netochka nezvanova/antiorp, as well as a piece of writing by arthur rimbaud (french poet)
For later stuff I mixed ideas I got from all sorts of places, danmaku shmups, visual artists like Maeda or Robert Hodgin’s magnetosphere, as well as old blogs like dataisnature

And intentionally doing the opposite of what I was seeing done in demos

In the early 2000s I was carrying blank sheets of paper and wrote down lots of ideas of concepts etc… I miss those times.

I almost never start with a visual concept. I start with a mind artifact, a worldly or psychological concept, a feeling, some real-life observation, or a message I want to communicate. I verbalize it or not. Then the visuals conveying that spring to mind. Usually they completely saturate and overflow the zone. I reduce them to bare minimum needed. I have nice catalogue of SID music stuck my head, so most times I know exactly what I want in the prod.

Sexadelic - 70's music and visuals, psychedelic mushrooms (no we did not take them) and Vampyros Lesbos movie.

4gentE that’s interesting; my creative process is very similar. I often start with some feeling or concept or idea, usually describable in 1-3 words, and then i start looking for visual inspirations to that. Sometimes i encounter some thing that makes me feel a certain way (like a particular scene in a movie, a piece of music, a painting, or something i encounter in the real world), and then i build a demo around that with the intent of channeling some of that feeling to the viewer, so that i might in some vague way share the experience with them.

And sometimes it’s just ”lol i made a funny looking effect i guess i’ll make a demo about it” :)

Same for Adapt - Bubblin Under. The smoke being becomes smoke monster :) LOST!

i just had to do this:

Outlined - Outline 2007 64k invitation happened more or less by accident.

I was looking for a new 64k idea and stumbled upon a basic piece of code on the Internet about marching squares.

I started playing with it, changed the code and added more and more features. This random piece of code triggered a snowball effect and got me obsessed with 2D effects in the weeks that followed, which eventually became that intro. I remember using every single minute of my lunch breaks at work to try silly ideas.



The year after, I wanted to see how we could make those 2 blobs more interesting visually, which led to the liquid metal effect in Stargazer. The code had nothing in common anymore but it was probably still that same obsession :D

I was there gandalf where le kelops du cul il a sorti sa playground prod et ca gérait du fion.

for the minimalartifact stuff i used to have a bunch of references from experimental audio / microsound / noise / industrial scenes, just from listening to all the different albums and artists in that genre. they were not visual artist references per se (apart from ryoji ikeda i guess). so the visuals we experimented with were more trying to find something that fit the audio elements. some worked out, others ended up cringe. was also cool to collaborate with other people and learn what they made of it visually (visualice, pixtur, dominator, navis) they all had different interpretations of what, to me, was the same type of audio baseplate. which is cool and what collab should really be about imho, ending up making something you would never consider doing if you were tackling it alone.

for the more current/nonsense stuff, it depends on the project, some projects come with their own mood boards and references (oni had a whole bunch of references for space logistics for example) i don't really like copycatting/remaking/imitating, but they can always serve as inspiration and references, if try to find/understand why those projects did things like they did, you'll undoubtedly get inspired on how you can apply similar concept to your own project i'm talking in terms of buildup, story-telling, direction in particular but i guess it can also apply in terms of aesthetics to some degree.

for the more absurd stuff i think i have a lot of subliminal references from monty python, other comic series, and vintage tpolm demos (and a bunch of other non tpolm demo favorites that also pushed the "what?!" sentiment) that showed a lot what works and what doesnt in terms of demo making with the absurd. but it's usually more about starting a storyboard with what we got and try to keep it being interesting throughout, adapt and switch things around when it feels like it's still boring.

doesn't always pan out though, halberd demo for example was great idea but somehow ended up failing on execution imho. despite a few iterations to try to make it more interesting.