My final piece

And here it is, the final animation.

I'm pretty happy with the end result, I admit, the story is a little weird and kinda wish I had a better idea really, that's what was the most time consuming of this module, thinking of ideas to the music, but in the end, I feel it flows quite well and was good experience for future projects, I would definitely want to learn more about after effects and look into using different objects for other stop motions.

After Effects

Throughout this year, we have used a collection of different Adobe software that I had used before and either was confident or knew the basics with them. But After Effects I had never tried, mainly because I had never looked into video editing before. At first it's daunting, your screen gets filled with timelines and render queues and buttons I'd never heard of.

I knew what I wanted to do in AE, it was just a matter of how I apply that to my animation, it was simple enough on paper, but it took several tutorials to do just the simplest things...

my first task was adding text, because of my basic skills, i kept the text simple, ideally I would have wanted something much more complex to happen with the text, but I chose to do a simple fade in, fade out option throughout the first 2 scenes, using keyframes and changing the opacity.

The next task was fading the music out at the end so it didn't just suddenly stop, thankfully this process was very similar to the above with text, so that problem was soon solved.

The biggest problem was getting the music and animation to play at different speeds, It just wasn't working, either the music would slow down and sound really deep, or speed up and go high pitched, I spent a long time trying to fix it but instead, I increased the speed of my animation by 10% and rendered it without sound and turned it into a .mov, knowing that hopefully, I could just simple drag and drop the music onto the .mov in iMovie and it should fit together fine.

Thankfully, it did.

A close version of the final piece

Instead of editing each piece in After Effects (one of the most confusing programs ever) I decided to leave that until last and just use iMovie to help give me the idea of stop motion and putting music to it, this helped speed up the process of being able to quickly check and then going back to the camera and re-shooting something if necessary

List of things I need to edit:

Print to pixel and my name needs to go in there somewhere

make it faster by roughly 10%

align the music to her pace

cut out a few pictures that aren't required

Time to load my pictures in After Effects.

Dancing and Waving: The final scenes

The song is a feel good song, and as soon as the beat kicks in, it's hard to not want to move to the music, which is why I thought a scene with dancing in would be perfect.

making lego people dance however, I thought was quite a challenge...

At the moment, the girl has just got out of her car and is walking on the beach towards a party where there is dancing going on, she walks towards as they dance, and then the camera shoots to a different angle, a shot of the house in view and each character lined up waving simultaneously.

The shot of them dancing and her walking.

The set.

Introduction to the animation

I needed something to start the animation off, before the 'ba da da ba da ba' kicked in, so that when that bit did start, the girl would be walking to the music.

looking through footage I had taken while playing with lego, I found a bit where she turns around from facing the camera and walks away from the camera

The rest of the video is messy, but that bit just seemed to work, I went to iMovie and quickly threw it in and just placed the music on and this is what I had so far...

Introduction and 2 scenes

Things seemed to be coming together, and I was pretty happy that I hadn't had a major disaster.. yet.

Adding the car

The car scene was my least planned one, not because I wasn't prepared, but more because I felt it had to be one of them, unexpected ideas, originally I set out to do all the scenes with the camera stationary, but instead of having different angles for this scene, I felt moving the camera while moving the car at the same time would give it a much more realistic feel to the animation and also include more motion

Before I tried moving both, I filmed what the car would look like moving just one brick per picture

It turned out to be quite successful

For the final second scene, I needed to move the car, the camera and the background, after getting it wrong the first few times, I got into a routine and finally got it right, and also decided to add the car door opening to help the story flow into the next scene, while people in the background are waving at her and horses are eating grass.

First Scene

After sorting out my set and listening to the music, over and over again, I thought I'd give my first scene a shot!

After putting it to the music, I knew it needed a little intro before this, but I'm quite pleased on how it went, the walking is quite smooth, the brick work behind goes quite well, and I only edited this in iMovie and made it 0.1 secs per picture. When editing it properly, I think it should be a little faster, I need to make sure she is moving to the beat.