Music mapping

Music mapping is a term I have invented to describe my process of understanding my music properly from a timing perspective and instrumental breakdown. 

Seen below is a drawing of the music firstly as a block sound and then as individual instruments. This showed me what I needed to know for how many possible shapes or colours I would need in my storyboard. 

After doing this, due to the amount of detail in the melody and wanting to make the After Effects process as quick and painless as possible I created a timing sheet so that I know where everything is supposed to go before starting my animation. I think this will help me because I won't need to rearrange things once I start, it also gives me a rough idea of how many key drawings/layers I need (note, not key frames). It looks complicated but there is method to my madness.

Moving forward

After doing the workshops I have decided that I am comfortable with doing things digitally rather than stop motion or illustration so this is the method I will use for my animation.

After Effects - Workshop 4

In this workshop we worked with green screening combined with the layering of techniques from the previous session.

                    

I thought this was quite a quick and easy process to do and I like the outcome with the exception of the light movement. We created a 'null object' which my light would follow and I made my area too big. Other than that I think it works fine and I am now considering including a light following an object in my animation.

                      

The piece I have created here was just to show that I could remove the back ground on a piece so I started off with a green background and then completely took it away. I don't like doing this process and I didn't enjoy the process of stop motion I used for the pennies.

After Effects - Workshop 3

In this workshop we used a lot of techniques such as cameras, lights and adding text to an image to create a 3D effect animation. This process is called 2D to 3D animation. Below is what I produced in the workshop.

                      

I really like how this works and I'm proud of the camera work with the focusing. After doing this I went home to try and create another one myself, after forgetting how to do a couple of things I tried to produce a similar image.

                     

With this animation is was hard to get the camera focusing just right because the cartoon style made it hard to see which parts of the image were in sharp focus and which were blurred. It isn't as good at the Spiderman animation but I still managed to get the processes in there which is the more important thing.

Using the camera and lights was hard and confusing at first but now it has become something that I surprisingly comfortable with, this gives me confidence to maybe use a light or camera technique in my project.

Stop Motion Animation 2

After doing my first set of experiments I went back and did some more work on it to try out different frame rates.

                      

This was my second attempt at my Snake animation. As I said previously I wanted it to run slower because I wanted it to be more jerky like the original game I was inspired by. I think I achieved this by changing the frame rate to 6fps instead of the previous 12fps and I think it works a bit better.

                       

In my previous experiments I liked Build and Spiral so here I have combined the two at 8fps. I like the way it looks and how changing the colours which layered on top of each other makes it obvious what's happening.

I still think it would be possible to use something like this for my project idea and I will most likely do further experiments with stop motion with my music.

Stop Motion Animation Workshop

In this workshop we use the application I Can Animate and a rostrum camera set up to take individual images which became frames in a 12fps animation. I liked this process and thought it was easy to do - it was a lot easier than when I used it for my cell animation using my iPad. We used lego blocks in our animations because it was fixed form that was easy to work with.

                   
                                               

This was the first thing I produced. I started with the yellow and then I thought I'd make a sort of gradient to add interest by adding the red, I continued doing this until the end. I think it worked well but I got a little confused with which way my slide was going.

                    
                                                     

After the workshop I made more lego animations, this being the first. I tried to experiment with a swirl pattern which was difficult to pull off with squares but I like the speed which it runs at.

                     
                                                           

This was inspired by the old game Snake. I think this runs too fast and I would have liked it to have had that old game feel, it might have worked better if I'd used a lower frame rate such as 8 or even 6 so get the effect of little breaks between movements.

                     

A few other people in the group were doing different things to me, one thing they were doing was building upwards towards the camera so I decided to try it myself. I thought it would have ran slower than this but I still like it's speed however, I don't think it has nearly enough of an effect as if it was shot from the side and mot above.

                       

This was my final creation of the day inspired by volume bars, I really like this, I think the fast speed closely mimics the volume bars on hifi systems. I think this is possibly my favourite thing I made.

I can imagine all of the above clips (apart from Snake) running in sync with music to visually demonstrate the rhythm.

After Effects - Workshop 1

In the After Effects workshop we were taught how to use the functions in the program including how to set up compositions, selecting layers and scaling of images. Eventually we got into rotating too. However, before doing this we were taught about pixels on Photoshop and then we edited out image, the Batman logo in Photoshop before opening the file in After Effects. Below is the clip which I produced.

                 

After the workshop I went back to After Effects and made another logo animation.

                 

For both of these I used the same process as before with separating the logo elements and making them move. I like the Mastercard one more than the Batman one because it runs a bit better and uses both rotation and positioning on the page to manipulate it. 

I think these simple movements are definitely something which I can transfer into my project.

Storyboard

I decided to use idea 1 for my final storyboard because there is a lot of experimentation I could do with it and more things happen in this idea than in the simpler idea 2. I think when this is animated it will look good when in sync with my music.

New ideas

Way back at the start of the project we were asked to come up with words about how we felt about the music etc, I created a bigger list but never narrowed it down to the required 3. My 3 words are: bass,  sway and repeat. 

I think the section of the song that I have chosen suits a rhythmic abstraction piece. 

Idea 1

This is my first idea, here I have the bassline represented by rectangles which would run along the bottom of the screen for as long as that sound is present and then circles, for the melody, to contrast that which come out at different points and sizes in the area and stay for the short amount of time the sound is present. I think this is a good idea albeit simple but I think simple is good if it can be done well.

Idea 2

For this idea I came up with this "onion skin" design which has the same principle as idea 1. The rings apear when sound is present and not when sound isn't. Each ring would represent a bass or melody sound. I think this is my simplest idea and I'm not sure how it would look, it may look quite nice with the design but dull at the same time due to lack of movement.

Idea 3

My final idea is the most complicated of the three. Unlike the others which can be created in different ways this would be digital only. I was inspired by things I saw but having not seen the computer software yet I may be putting all my eggs in one basket. The idea works in the same way as the other two where a shape represents a sound, here the ribbons/wavy shape/wisp represents the bass and the puffs of smoke represent the melody. I do like the idea but it's a gamble and a challenge.

Sound edit

Before continuing into my storyboarding stage I thought I would edit down my track so that I only wrote an animation specifically for my chosen part and not one that could just fit anywhere.
Below is the sound clip I will be using.