Role: motion design, particle effects, post production, rigging
Software: Adobe After Effects/ particular
Software: Adobe After Effects/ particular
My good friends Rodrigo Zampini and Yumi Shimada called up and asked me if I wanted to help making a music video. Since I did only 2 or 3 of those back in the day, I jumped to the opportunity.
This was right in the middle of the pandemic, so we had to get creative with how we pulled it off. Yumi had been doing these awesome collages, so we decided to go with that style and add Motion Design to it.
The first limitation was that despite Zampini being an amazing video director the decision was to not use footage since we couldn't gather people to film. So, we came up with this idea to use a still photo of the singer's face and make it look like they were singing.
Since the song was a solid five minutes long, I couldn't see myself manually doing all the lip syncing.
On to automation then. I used the music's volume peaks to make the singer's mouth move, kinda like Terrence and Philip from South Park. People liked it, but I had my doubts about whether it was good enough (it wasn't).
On to automation then. I used the music's volume peaks to make the singer's mouth move, kinda like Terrence and Philip from South Park. People liked it, but I had my doubts about whether it was good enough (it wasn't).
Anyway, with that out of the way I decided that a stop-motion style would go hand in hand with Yumi's collages, I started automating and setting Dynamic Animations to everything so I could to save time and sanity .
First off, in all the projects I work, everything must move, smoothly with intros and outros; Never really liked cuts. So, I made sure everything transitioned seamlessly from one scene to the next. Plus, I had this master control on the main timeline to handle all the layer wiggles and changes in frame rate. We aimed for a final output of 30fps, but inside After Effects, the animations were running at around 8fps, giving it that handmade stop-motion feel we were going for.
We threw in some loopable textures and video glitches for smooth transitions and that extra style.
One thing I loved about this project was how open it was to ideas. We went back and forth regularly, tossing around concepts for each scene. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the usual projects that come with everything already mapped out.
As we neared the finish line, I was still kinda annoyed with how the singer's mouth animation looked. Fortunately the singer was kind enough to film himself singing on his phone and that opened a new avenue of possibilities for us. All three singers sent their recordings, and after a bit of stabilization, I came up with a way to artistically mask their mouths and eyes procedurally, so I could animate it toggle on and off. It finally was looking the way it was meant to.
The whole thing took about 4 to 5 months, and we did it in our spare time, which helped keep us sane during the pandemic. I'm pretty proud of the end result. Rashid loved the Visual Storytelling, and so did we. And now, two years later, it's got 1.1 million views. It just goes to show that when you put love and care into something, it can turn out amazing. I'm thrilled to have been part of it.
