: - V

Hey ya'll. It is... 5AM.
Me and the roommate are going to celebrate with lattes tomorrow. This project has taken up all my free time I'M SO HAPPY TO BE DONE (though I'm sure I'll tweak some things here and there).

I forget if I said this in my last post but I wouldn't mind saying it again; I've learned SO much from this project. Organization is so important. And making sure you've got your pre-planning DOWN is so so very important too. Working with Liv was awesome. I'm happy to have gotten the chance to work with someone so talented :-) I think we both learned a lot from this project.

Anyways, I'm going to bed.

Dang Dog Dang Diggity Dog Dang Dang Dang Diggity Dog

So I had to scrap most of my work (so long tea cups and cakes!) but the new stuff looks pretty superb. 

I can't believe how much I've learned from this project. Not just in my field (which I've kept you all updated on) but in other people and other artists. You'd think artists would understand each other but the languages between each profession are vastly different. Composition to Liv means an entirely different thing to me. I think our miscommunication was the key thing that stopped me and Liv from being on the same page most the time. 

I also learned (and this is incredibly silly for me not to have known beforehand) that making a mixdown is hard and requires time and a lot of talent. One thing Liv realized is that people outside of the music profession think mixes can just be pulled out of thin air. No one ever sees the layers upon layers upon layers of sound they have to weave together. No one even thinks about WHERE they get their sound. They just assume the musician know what they're doing and just produce it. It's like making sketches and thumbnails. Testing things out, brushing things up, making sure the placement is right before you go in and make it final. Visually, if you work in programs like Photoshop, you can understand a person having a hundred layers for one illustration. Same with musicians. They can have a hundred layers of different sounds for a song. I need to take up an instrument.

THERE'S HOPE!

With my newfound knowledge of cross dissolves and my limited time, I think I'm going to tackle the rest of this project a little differently. For the parts that I can get away with, I will use cross dissolves between illustrated keyframes. Other scenes like the one that represent the music abstractly will be animated since they are so simple. If there's time at the end I will spruce up the other scenes and see if I can add some animation between them.

Small Update

Technical Questions:

- Cross dissolves in After Effects

- Tweening in Flash or After Effects

Mellowing

Cool news, cool news. My friend Haley Monsoon will be interviewing Liv Rand and I on our collaborative piece! So that will be a fun thing to look forward to.

I think I've somewhat mellowed down from last week's freak out. Most of the anxiety was due to miscommunication. Weeks ago I had asked Liv if she could "speed up" her version of the song and "add beats" when I should have asked her to re-record her version at the same tempo as the original track and to make sure to keep true to the cords heard in the beginning of the song. I should brush up on my musical jargon or take up an instrument or something. I want to continue working with musicians in the future so it would be good for me to learn how to speak their language! I'm still awaiting Liv's final final version of her cover. Not knowing what that sounds like is the only thing keeping me on edge. I'm sure everything will be fine though. Liv seems to be a very organized person and her teacher tells me she's very reliable. Once I get that I'll post it on here.

Anywho. In terms of what I've been up to, I've found out that SWF files can be imported into After Effects. Maybe that was a no brainer for some but to me it was a revelation! I've had been converting my Flash projects as Animated GIFS, which then would totally lose their original colour in After Effects.

This is from the Animated GIF exported from Flash. Notice how the colours got more yellow?

This is from the SWF with the original colours.

Plus the GIFs weren't transparent so I couldn't make simple colour corrections to match up the shots without messing up the background.

After all this is done I think I'm going to take some crash courses on Linda.com for Flash and After Effects. I could have been much further ahead in this project if I knew all the stuff I'm finding out now. There's a lot of useful stuff out there that I'm not aware of.

Animating in the Dark

I really wish I could have given this project the time it deserves. I'm very grateful to the talented musicians I'm collaborating with. But with the time frame that we've been given to work on this project, I feel that it's less than ideal. Ideally it would have been better if we had time to finish up the song first before we even thought of drawing up a story board. Instead, some students (like myself) are animating to an idea of what the music might sound like. 

In the beginning I was very excited for this project, but right now I feel like the work I'm doing is a waste because for all I know the piece of music that will be given to me could be completely different. The mere beat of the original song is so incredibly important that without it my work will look embarrassing. I really do feel like I'm animating in the dark. 

I will try to keep a good spirit though. It's hard to find motivation to work on this project, especially when I have other class's work to attend to, but I'll still push myself to do the work anyways. I'm certain Liv will make a beautiful cover song, she's not at fault in any of this. I only wish I could have the time to animate to it properly. 

I think I'm making this way too complicated than it needs to be, haha.

I'MCRASHING&BURNING

I'm figuring out that this piece isn't going to be as fluid as I wanted it to be (knowing that I only have like four or three weeks for work on this).

Aside from that, I've been doing my rough animation in Flash CC, exporting them as GIFs, dragging those into Photoshop CC, and rotoscoping over that. 

I love colouring in PS but since I don't have much time to do anything fancy I might just stick to colouring in FL instead of going through this whole import export thing. 

I spent so much time trying to figure out what kind of file was best to export out of FL to be worked on. Lots of trial and error. I found the best way is export>export movie>animated gif (this way, saved as a gif, the file will retain the amount of time each frame lasts so you wont' have to redraw the same thing over and over again in PS). Then you take that gif, drag it into PS (get the animation time frame up), put all those layer into a folder, set that folder to "new layers visible", make another folder for rotoscoping, unselect "new layers visible". Select a frame, make a new layer, draw, repeat. I spent half the time trying to figure out all sorts of technical stuff. 

Animatic! (1/3 of it, hur hur)

I cannot express how much fun I'm having with this project! I'm so glad Liv is having just as much fun with it :)
She was able to send me a scratch track of where she and Jake are right now with the song and it was beautiful! But the tempo was 50% slower than expected and the track was missing some key beats that I was heavily piggybacking off of that would have changed the entire palette of the song for me. So I quick emailed her about it. Ultimately I'll use whatever she gives me, I'm so grateful to be working with her. She says they planned on adding beats with a ukelele or some synthetic techno sounds so it's all good! She also said she can try making it a little faster to keep up with the initial mood of the song. 

Cute side story - Liv says she heard our song at work and flipped out! Haha X-D
I have also been playing this song non-stop, all day er'day (though I kind of do that already, haha)

Progress Report

Cool things are happening! Liv just recruited Jake Varrone to help with music mixing. He says he'll throw in a drum track too so that's awesome! 

On my part I've seen setting standards for the animation (ex: palettes, face shape) and I've got some backgrounds and props made.

When listening to this song I don't want to just animate some pretty pictures to it but I also want to help convey the true meaning of the song for it. Whether that's through facial expressions or some abstract animation. When I hear the song I feel calm and happy and I see and feel fluid swooping movements. 

I asked Liv what she felt was most strongly conveyed in this song and she said that "it has depth and the lyrics also portray something more complex than a love song or a breakup song. It says that it's not enough to do things the normal way and you won't learn anything if you don't step 
outside of what you know but it also says that things will end up the way they are meant to."  When she said this I immediately linked that with a few drawings I made for the initial storyboard. At one point I have the subject of the song looking and reaching out of a window with a curious and longing look on her face. 

Visually I think this one shot best portrays that idea. I can see someone who is enjoying their life but also someone who is reaching out for the more that life has in store for them.

Batch of Boards

Today we got to pitch our ideas in class. I'm pretty confident in my piece but I didn't know we had to animate to the entire song! I'm going to have to simplify some things and use loops where I find fit. Right now I've got some basic boarding done, though it's missing the representation of the last two verses of the song. But I was able to quick sketch that up in class, so stay tuned for more! The music professor, Reggie Pindell, came in to check up on us again. He seemed pretty confident with pairing Liv and I together, and I'm glad he did. Liv is so wonderful! One thing I remember him saying is that he was happy that I was talking like this project was just as much hers as it was mine. And I do believe that. 

I know I still have yet to dive into this project but I know this is something I'd be happy doing on my own time. I'm thinking of making fliers at the end of the semester (or whenever) to put up around the music school. I'm not musically talented myself but I would love to collaborate with people who are to make some cool, cheap music videos. (The quality of the animation would all depend on how much time I could give and how into the music I was since this would all be purely volunteer.)

Here are the boards I have so far:

There's a group of cords at the beginning of the song, so for each beat I will take away parts of the cake,
I will replace tea cups with other tea cups, I will replace cakes with other cakes for each new beat. I
also want to throw in a few rotating cakes and and orange that's tossed and cut in the air.

I'm a very narrative person, so I'm trying very hard not to make everything too too literal.
I thought I'd throw in some wiggling cords and bouncing boxes to represent certain parts of the music.

The Choice Has Been Made!

After much thought We've chosen the song Next Time Around by Little Joy! 

It's a song that I've loved since I discovered it last year. I played it every morning! Liv loved it too and was really hoping I'd choose it. Overall I had a more rounded idea for this song than Oh Ana, and I think I should be able to accomplish what I want to do. I'll be coming up with some concept art for each shot soon (or maybe that will all just be jumbled into my animatic). 

I asked Liv if she would like to be animated in the video and she was thrilled and said yes! I think I've got her form down pretty well.

I'm thinking of using a mixture of Flash and Photoshop animation for this one. I'm very inspired by indie animators online like Alex Grigg, Charles Huettner, and Scott Benson. Alex Grigg and Charles Huettner especially are known for their Photoshop animation which was very inspiring for me. And Scott Benson's editing techniques are extremely impressive. Though I'm leaning more towards a narrative approach I would also like to represent the music abstractly with moving lines and bouncing blocks.

Meeting with the Musician

Concept art for Oh Ana by Mother Mother

     

     Today I got in contact with the singer I was paired up with for our class's first collab project. Her name is Olivia Rand (Liv). Turns out we have very similar taste in music and we were able to agree on a lot! She was very nice and fun to talk to. (oh, and did I mention she sounds like Adele and Florence combined!) Amongst the songs we chose, two really stuck out for the both of us: The Next Time Around by Little Joy and Oh Ana by Mother Mother. Sometime tomorrow I'll have a rough storyboard for both songs and I'll make my final decision based on which one I like the best and which one I think I can realistically finish on time. Liv told me to inform her on the final decision so she can start on a demo song.

     I'm very excited for this project. I love music and always dreamed of making my own music videos. It's great that I get the chance to work with someone so talented! :-D  

Concept art for Next Time Around by Little Joy

     I asked Liv about her possibly giving a live performance while the animation was screening for this big premiere and she was totally into the idea!