Hello Students!

While I'm chipping away at my next class I've also been in the process of buying a house and working on some fun animation projects. I recently had the incredible opportunity to be asked by one of my favorite musicians to make two lyric videos for an upcoming album. Roy Mitchell-Cárdenas of MUTEMATH (my favorite band) is part of a side project called The Pink Dust, and the released two singles ahead of the new album. I've been in contact with Roy before, and even got to show him the lyric video I did for one of MUTEMATH's songs, so it was a huge deal for me to get the chance to actually work with him professionally.

You can check out both videos here:

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Night Vices

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Open Your Eyes

And you'll notice on both of those links there's also a time lapse video showing my entire process from start to finish on each. I really tried to do new things with these two videos and experimented with a lot of different techniques I wasn’t too familiar with. So, here are a few things I learned and some behind the scenes stuff for each video.

I was given a very loose idea of visuals for both videos. There were suggestions for what could go on screen for most of the lines of the lyrics, but I was given a lot of creative freedom to “do my thing”.

The first video, “Night Vices” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i7ileWs3fk), was made up on the fly, completely in After Effects. I started by laying out all the lyrics line by line to the music in one massive comp, and then created visuals off the top of my head from the first verse through to the end of the song. Nothing was planned out ahead of time, and I had no real idea of what I was going to do next until I got there.

The second video, “Open Your Eyes” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkHa8TC5lHE, I approached differently. I knew that I wanted to try designing, illustrating and hand texturing most of the assets for this video. I wanted to try my best to make it feel like it was done by hand, which is something I wasn’t that comfortable doing. Since that was a much more intensive way of doing things than just making everything up in AE, I knew that I needed a clear idea of what the video was going to look like before I started animating. So I boarded out most of the frames for the entire video in Photoshop. This ended up being a huge undertaking, as the video was 5:30 long; you can see in the time lapse that I don’t really start working in AE until 2:12. That’s almost 20 hours of work I did before I even touched animation. The great thing about designing everything first was that it forced me to think through the entire video, plan out transitions, and actually build assets that I could use in AE. On top of that, I was able to show the client an animatic before I did any real work, just so he had a good grasp on what the final product was going to look like.

Something I did for both videos was make it seem like it was animated at 12fps instead of 24fps. I did that because I thought it would give the illusion of being cel-animated. The way I went about it, though, was a combination of using the posterize time effect, and an expression that would only update animations every 2nd frame. The reason I wanted to keep the comp at 24fps was so that if any motion happened too quickly and looked choppy because of the low frame rate, I could just take off the posterize time or expression and have that animate at the full 24fps. What I learned: if you’re going to try to make something look like it’s 12fps, go all in and make your comp’s frame rate 12fps. I ran into so many issues where animations were updating on the in-between frames; it was a nightmare. On top of that, dropping the fps to 12 literally cuts your render time in half. Just commit to working in 12fps, and animate in a way that works at 12fps.

In the second video you’ll notice I made and used a lot of alternating textures and brush strokes. I painted those in Photoshop using an iPad Pro and the Astropad app. I can tell from experience on both a wacom cintiq and a surface pro 3 that the iPad Pro performs surprisingly well with the Astropad app, even over a wifi connection. It honestly felt just as comfortable to use and as responsive as any graphics tablet I’ve used.

One of the techniques I knew I wanted to try out in this second video was having elements appear to be painting on, but without actually moving the brush strokes around. Instead, I wanted to paint every brush stroke of an element on its own layer, and then just sequence those layers turning on in AE one frame at a time. As you can imagine, I had hundreds and hundreds of brush stroke layers because of this. What’s worse, I figured I should work at 2x the resolution just in case I needed to zoom in or enlarge any of the elements. So, hundreds of 4000px wide photoshop layers for dozens of elements that needed to be animated for a 5:30 minute video all had to exist inside a single AE project file. That made AE CHUG every time I had to open the project. It really taxed my machine any time I went from one scene to the next. AE had to process all of the textures and brush strokes from every scene every time I switched. Apparently it wasn’t able to cache everything all at once, so any time I moved from one scene to the next, I would get the spinning pinwheel, and have to just let it sit there for a good 30 seconds up to a minute at a time. It made the animation process very frustrating. The good news is it didn’t take long to render once it was loaded, because I wasn’t doing any crazy effects with the assets, just turning layers on and moving them around. But if I had to do it again, I would only increase the resolution by maybe 15%-20%. Not double.

For each video I animated the portions with the lyrics first, then the instrumental sections (always a challenge to come up with something interesting for those parts), and finished them off by going to the beginning to animating the band’s name and song title. I do it in that order so that I’ve already finished the look and feel of the entire video before making the first thing you’ll see when watching it. That way I know the title animation won’t need to be reworked after animating the song.

If you're looking for time lapse software and you're on a mac, look no further than Screen Ninja. It allows you to "solo" apps so only what you want to be captured is. Plus it'll automatically pause the time lapse when you're not in one of those programs, plus a bunch of other great stuff. Totally work the $20.

So both of these videos really stretched me as both a designer and animator. I hope this little bit of insight is helpful to some of you, and if you have any questions about any part of either video, feel free to ask!

Jake Bartlett

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