Haunting Melody Animation Process (So far…)
After the extreme challenge of working on Is All of It In Vain?, I decided to push myself a little further by setting a deadline of July 31 for my next animation project, Haunting Melody. This would allow me just a little over two months to finish it, which meant I had to chunk it down into “stages”. And by that, I mean, since this animation is multimedia (like most of my animations), I would give myself a set of milestones relating to each medium I work with, thus layering them one at a time to eventually give the final result. The first month (June,) I had only to focus on compositing images as well as some footage in After Effects. I accomplished this by the end of June, as scheduled. This article will show how I did it.
The first thing I did was to gather up all the images I needed to create the initial composites. As you can see, these images are all organized across eighteen folders. Each folder represents a scene, and I organize them this way so I don’t get too overwhelmed. And as you’ll see below, I organize multiple scenes in After Effects in a similar fashion.
This image shows a stack of layers on a timeline. Each of these layers is a scene.
To use one of the scenes as an example, below is a screenshot of all the images that went into creating that scene.
Multiple images were cut out and then combined like a collage to create the scene. In the above image, you’ll notice that there are whole images plus transparent PNGs containing elements I cut out of each whole image. For example, the cow head at center left is taken from the first cow photograph you see in the top row. The lower right torso image was cut from the farmer photograph directly above it. And so on…
And here’s how I combined those images to create the scene!
It gets even more interesting! Below you will see a screenshot containing images of mouths. These were combined to create a lipsynch stop motion sequence for some of the character rigs.
These images were shot in my bathroom mirror with full frontal lighting.
In the below images, I’ll show you the rest of the process.
This is the PSD file in which I cut out all the lips from the above mentioned images. Each image is in a separate layer, as seen at right.
Then I imported the PSD file into After Effects so that I could sync each layer up with the audio. This was a very delicate process requiring a good ear and lots of audio scrubbing.
And here is the final result. The keyframes you see towards the bottom represent some adjustments in position which were necessary in order to keep the mouth movements consistent with their position on the face.
For some reason, I’m no longer able to embed YouTube Shorts on Squarespace, but here’s a link to a Short I made illustrating this part of the process.
Once you use this technique, you’ll find that the possibilities are limitless. (Rock on!)
Before I sign off, I just wanted to take a quick second to let you know that I can send more blog entries like this one to your email inbox in a monthly digest, so you never miss another one. And I also send subscribers a page from my sketchbook every week. Here’s the link to sign up!