animated video clip

[cuebit]

Hi all,

I wanted to share my work and see what you think of my new animated videoclip.

a smal version can be seen on www.stayinbedtoday.com
you can also take a look at my website if you have some spare time.

enjoy,

Maarten

[Genete]

Wow!
Lot of questions about tips and tricks are boiling in my mind watching your excelent and awesome music video!!!

How did you do the reflection in the floor when she falled down on it?
In which program did you do the textures (very good ones)?
How many Anime Studio / Moho files did you needed to achieve the complete project?
How many time/people did it?
...
Congratilations!

Genete

[J. Baker]

Nice work on the animation! Catchy tune.

[cuebit]

How did you do the reflection in the floor when she falled down on it?
In which program did you do the textures (very good ones)?
How many Anime Studio / Moho files did you needed to achieve the complete project?
How many time/people did it?

Hi Genete,

I'm glad you like it.
Here's the answers to your questions.

The reflections on the floor where made in after effects. I made a copy of the movie i created and flipped it. Now it runs the same way as the original movie only it's up side down. Then later on added some opactity to the flipped movie so the floor can be seen through it. The last thing i did was the fade out to let the mirror immage dissapear into the floor. That can be achieved with a mask. place the mask outside the boundaries of the movie and shrink the borders with the mask expansion property. Finally added some feather to the mask.

The textures where hand drawn on paper, inked and scanned in.
The clip basically consists of billboards placed in 3d space.

In the clip there are about 8 characters which i set up in Anime Studio.
The smartest thing to to is to build the characters from different angles.
For the female head character this is a 3/4 view, a front view, a side view and an over shoulder view. The heads where made first so it was relatively easy to import it as a file and put in on top of the body.

Not all characters have that many angles because that would take a lot of time. The most interesting angle to view a character is the 3/4 (three quarter) view. with that you can do al lot.
The characters are put together from a mixture of images and vectors.

It took me three months to make the clip.
First i generated some ideas, then made a moving storyboard.
with the moving storyboard as a guideline the shots where accomplished one by one, doing the animation, artwork and compositing at once.

off course some things drawn or animated earlier can be used again.

i hope this all makes sense to you.

Cheers,

Maarten

[ulrik]

WOW!
Very well done, I love the storyline, it's working really well, good timing with the music, and very nice effects.
ANd the song is great as well
Congratulations!!

[human]

I think one of the lessons of this clip is that it's the little details which add so much of the interest and charm.

Little things mean a lot -- when there are so many of them, so smartly done.

[moorsel]

I like it very much!

Gr,
Frank

[lordstok]

Very impressive! I have a heap of questions for you

I thought the backgrounds really made this video clip for me, are the textures basically paper/media textures from the graphics program you used?

Also was all the lighting on the textures done in this external program too, within AS or in post (after effects)?

I would love to achieve backgrounds like yours in my own project, what resolution (dpi) are you generating them in? I have never produced for TV before and was unsure of what resolution to work in and am already finding my first texture run to be too low for zooms and warps (72 dpi).

You also used a lot of bloom lighting in the dream sequence, was this done in AS with masks or in post/after effects?

Finally a small criticism - I thought the charachters themselves were a bit of a let down. Partly because of the style of animation (a personal taste) but also because the switch layers for the mouth were few, but later on in the side view (silhouette) the tweening animated mouth is very smooth and creates a continuity issue. And that brings me to what I disliked most about the charachters, and that is because the backgrounds are so fantastic and beautifully textured, the relatively simple charachters stand out too much (in a bad way). I thought the charachters looked most at home when silhouetted, or in the dream/cloud sequences (where they look more at home in the well lit scene) or when the singer is filtered on the 'tv' shots.

Finally let me say again how impressive your project is. Where can we download this as an AVI to watch it frame by frame?

[cuebit]

I are the textures basically paper/media textures from the graphics program you used?

Also was all the lighting on the textures done in this external program too, within AS or in post (after effects)?

I would love to achieve backgrounds like yours in my own project, what resolution (dpi) are you generating them in?

You also used a lot of bloom lighting in the dream sequence, was this done in AS with masks or in post/after effects?

Hi Lordstok,

It's nice to have all that positive reactions,

The textures are made with pencil on paper and then inked in with indian ink.
The greys where converted to color afterwards in photoshop to achieve a balanced image.
The scans i made where set on 150 dp. Only use 300 dpi if you can't zoom in enough.
The backgrounds where composited together in after effects, so every single object is a single drawing. I made trees, houses and so on.

The lightning on the textures is done in after effects. i kept it really simple.

For the dream sequence i used a filter in the post process. look for after effects filters and plugins on the net and you'll find several third party developpers.

You're right about some of the animation especially the mouth swithlayers but keep in mind it all was done with a very small budget on my own.

i'll see if i can post an avi in the next few days.

thanks a lot for your reaction,

kind regards,

Maarten

[DK]

I LOVE IT! and the song is great too! but...why is it free? I should think you could make a lot of money out of selling something like that?

D.K

[jahnocli]

Looks (and sounds!) great! You should be proud...

[ingie01]

Thank you for posting this cuebit. With the knowledge you have and the knowledge of many others keeps this forum top notch.
Just a quick question, did you spend money specifically for this project and how much?

[cuebit]

Just a quick question, did you spend money specifically for this project and how much?

Hi ingie01,

only the costs of the software, but that's obvious.
Next to that a few blocks of drawing paper. The costs of that where about 10 euros. And a lot of time. That's worth money to isn't it?

Maarten

[Bee-ruce2]

Nice job. Has a fresh look to it and does'nt give you a chance to become bored. Could I ask if the cloud sequences were done in AS or Aftereffects and in general what percentage of the project was done in AS vs. AE?

[cuebit]

Nice job. Has a fresh look to it and does'nt give you a chance to become bored. Could I ask if the cloud sequences were done in AS or Aftereffects and in general what percentage of the project was done in AS vs. AE?

Hi Bee-Ruce2,

The cloud sequences where done in aftereffects.The clouds are actually a bunch of images.
The charactermovies exported from the AS files move around in AE space and are followed by the scene camera while the clouds have a fixed position.
I don't exactly calculated what the percentages are for AS and AE but i can say all of the character animation was done in AS.
From that point all of the movies exported by AS where used in AE and composited together with the background objects.

Maarten