Animation at the Moment

Here are some quick progression videos of the animation style. These are not done! I still have a lot of animating to do, but the process is underway.

 Telescope/Pirate Scene

 Bazooka Girl (still needs explosion on the little girl)

 Spaceship flying (not done as well)

Enjoy!


process sketches for documentation:

Some sort of pheonix

It's kind of scary, seeing all this roughcut video. Before the color treatment, before effects, before the polish. I'm editing for hours trying to find just the perfect solution to an interior problem of structure and story and I sit back for a second and I think, what if I can't make this as cool as I want to? Which is a fair question because - and here's the secret truth - often, I can't make it as awesome as I want to. There's not enough time or money or footage or power or whatever to fully realize my dreams.

But here's the next thing - and this bears remembering - it always does turn out great in its own way. Sometimes according to plan and sometimes with a bit of serendipity, all the filming and planning and conceptualization and talking and thinking comes together into something that's neat. I'd do well to keep this in mind right now during this phase where everything is rough and half-together and crazy and chaotic.

I was thinking of all this when I was sent to this music video. It makes me cringe - no rhymed meter in that music? No continuity of story? What's with the narrator's diction? Oh yes, it's bad. To quote Kotaku, "In fact, it is bad. Its badness is the stuff of immediate legend. It is so bad that it comes all the way around and becomes good, then rams its way back into wretchedness before emerging from its own wreckage like some sort of phoenix." But you know what else? I love this. It's LARPers realizing their dream of making an epic heavy rock-opera fantasy music video. These guys likely had a really great time doing this video - and why shouldn't they?! I guess what I'm saying is this video is a cautionary tale - there but for the grace of god, many years of schooling in traditional filmmaking techniques, inherent grasp of story structure, the ability to know when things have gone Too Far and meticulous editing go I.



Rock on, dudes. And back to my editing of the minutia because in the end, the cohesion of this story combined with the pure joy captured as we were shooting is gonna make the Eldren music video excellent.

Final Editing: Video Inspirations

Since we're in the middle of doing our final cut for the music video, I thought that this would be a good time to look at some of our video inspirations. I remind you, dear viewer, that these music videos are professional videos and as such have tremendous production values. We're not aiming to copy them: we're looking at specific aspects to inspire us.

LOOK: Important to us is the feel of the music video. We want it to have the same whimsy as the song itself - the idea of imaginary friends and the fun of playing during childhood. We will be color-correcting and putting over the whole video a treatment that gives the video a sort of 70s feel, like the whole video is a moving Polaroid. 

Sigur Rós - Hoppípolla from Sigur Rós on Vimeo.


EFFECTS AND STYLE: For a good example of the kind of effects and style we want to emulate there is this video from the Smashing Pumpkins for Tonight Tonight. In this video we're looking at the effects - a sort of hand-done, paper-craft 2D aesthetic. The effects aren't trying to be slick and there's a sort of nostalgia to them. Note also the quirky costumes and the speeding up of clips in order to signal we're in 'story mode'.



STYLE AND EDITING: In the Blue October video for Into the Ocean they employ a time-ramp effect where the characters are suddenly sped up (for instance the dancers in the play). This is a great aesthetic and it clues our audience into the fact that this is more a make-believe world than a real world. The timing of the cuts in the Blue October video are also a heavy influence on us - in the Eldren video we're cutting to the music for the most part, telling a story, and then have shots of the band interspersed.



EFFECTS: For the effects that we'll be putting over the video we're looking at a look like the title sequence of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Lemony Snicket's End Titles from Jamie Caliri on Vimeo.

Cross that aesthetic with the hand-drawn look of the old 70s commercials for Tootsie Pops and you get the idea:

Rough Cut!

Good news! I am back in America now and come bearing gifts of a rough cut. I tried to switch things up a bit from our previous cuts to see if a bit of variety would help. We'll see how it goes.


Effects and color treatments will be on the way as soon as we anchor down the clips and edits.
Now comes the fun part!

 - Josh

Rough Cut Round 2

We are now entering the halfway stages of post-production. After the first round of rough cuts, Skye and I (Roxy) have gone through and combined what we think creates a rough cut 2 masterpiece!

Check it...

Skye's Rough cut

This is the rough - no transitions, no color correction, no effects; just shots generally where I want them.  Just like organizing math tests A-M and N-Z before putting them in alphabetical order to return to the class! Or something :/  Pay no attention to the wonky formatting - I exported this out in the wrong codex for youtube.  This video is like the Pirate Code - it's more of a guideline, really.

Shooting done yay!

Keeping the talent fed and happy

Josh gets some good closeups

I am pleased to say that we finished the last day of shooting on Sunday. Though we got a late start, we got almost everyone in the band to show up in the end and we took some lovely footage! Sunday was the day that we got the ending footage of the band playing and then sitting down and eating waffles - this mirrors what the children are doing during this time, playing air-guitar and then eating waffles.  Of course by the time the band is shooting the scene with the waffles the waffles are 2 days old and not... exactly... good. I'm half hoping and half fearing that the footage that Josh and Nasir shot of Nasir fake-throwing up so Josh can put in fake CG technicolor barf into the scene - well, I hope it doesn't make it into the rough cut  :)

And because of course there is no resting on our laurels, we have to cut the video while getting into pre-production for all the motion graphics and CG that we're going to layer in after the rough cuts are done. So here are some pre-production sketches of the little CG space creatures.

Hello there little chibi spacys!

Too robotic? Too complicated up top? Too cute underneath? The production team will need to talk about this. I also just remembered Peter Max, who did some great 70s pop art and this may be excellent inspirations for the Supernova scene... to the Internets for some ref!

Catch you in the middle of rough cuts!