I have been working on the timeline for the “No Escape!” music video. It has a total of 47 shots on it right now (I couldn’t fit them all into the screen cap. above). I had quite a few new scenes to drop into the timeline. It looks like I have about two thirds of the backgrounds finished. Most of the scenes have been animated, but there are some that need work.
After Effects isn’t doesn’t have the most intuitive timeline editor, so slipping and moving groups of clips can get messy. If you bump something one way or the other, you have to keep track of what else gets affected by that move. It is my application of choice for film making, so I can live with its flaws.
I hope to finish this video by the end of the year. It has been a great project to work on when I don;t feel like doing anything else. I just sit back and draw out scenes … block by block.
Just a little night sky timelapse. Shot on my Canon A640 - ISO 800 - Shutter open for 1 second - 96 frames @ 24fps.
I used an expression in After Effects to make the frame pulse to a predefined beat. It is a subtle effect that you can see clearly if you watch the power lines.
I am slowly learning more about how After Effects works behind the scenes with expressions and such. Pretty cool stuff.
Liz and I are working on the above scene for the music video for the song “No Escape!”. It may involve a multi-stage (three image) perspective shift as the blue creature advances out of the subway exit. I’ll start with the character being the size you see above, but as she walks down the path and towards the view, she may grow in size a little.
It may be tricky to pull off. I am doing this to a whole shot earlier in the film by widening the view progressively in steps four times. This requires redrawing each scene multiple times and changing the scale of the objects in the scene accordingly.
I might need to work on the subway exit itself too …
You can see the next shot in the video here, to get an idea where this subway exit is located.
Click the image above to play!
{Music = Tavern Theme from Dungeon Explorer}
-Watch as two hours of my life dissolves into nothingness-
Steve Guttenberg, Ben Affleck, Rick Moranis, Pauly Shore, and Sandra Bullock in this years funniest …
Wait … what?????!!!
The Gutworm has been vanquished. All hail the five heroes of the land as they ingest Cheetos, Yeastie Tings and Coca-Cola and do battle with the most foul beats.
I am starting to learn how the scripting language in After Effects works. Tonight, I went out and shot about 6 seconds of time lapse footage with my CHDK hacked Canon A640.
I dropped these frames into AE CS3 and then created a little drum loop.
Using AE’s expression controls I was able to convert the audio into a series of keyframes that I applied to the scale (size) of the images. This creates the visual pulse to the beat.
It was a very basic experiment … but it proves to me that I can do some very interesting thing by creating audio for the sole purpose of altering video.
Liz made this background plate for the “No Escape!” music video for my up coming album “Bits”. I’d say we’re almost halfway done with all the background plates.
So far, this animated movie has been constructed on a scene to scene basis, created directly from a story in my head. I should probably start to sequence some of the new background plates into my working composition in After Effects to see how the imagery is keeping pace with the music. I have all of the main scenes and the story arc worked out … but I lack a detailed storyboard.
This has made the whole project less structured, but maybe a little more fun. The large pixel size and limited colors leave some room for the imagination to fill in the blanks.
Here is the “neighborhood” wide shot for the “No Escape!” music video. The two main characters live here.
This shot is at the tail end of a five step zoom out produced by showing a sequence starting with a close up of a house and then jump cutting to shots further and further away. I have four of these different shots done … but it’s missing one in the middle to tie it together.
