Once I received the video from Robert and Sam I knew that I would have to story board some key points in the song. So to start off I had to watch the footage they gave me. Here are the thumbnails of the videos.
So a few problems arose that I had to address. The big one was aspect ratio, and the differences in what I was working in versus what they had filmed. With the iSight, unless you are capturing everything in iMovie you can’t get anything other than 4:3 images. I was working in 16:9. The footage of Sam and Robert together had other problems because they were really close together. Sam was stuck on that left side, since he wasn’t fully in the frame. Thankfully the solo performances they did were totally awesome, and very easy to remove the green from the background.
That being said, I had to come up with what to do with the footage. I wrote down words for imagery that would eventually compose up scenes. Food, eyeballs, psychedelic, beef, children, archery, pyramids, kaleidoscope, gingerbread, pork, Rachel Ray, morph, sparkles, fire works, boy scouts, astronauts, and violence were the first words I wrote. Beef and Pyramid were easily paired together. I had talked with my girlfriend amanda about building an actual pyramid out of beef, but it was much easier to use some of my knowledge tiling texture maps to build the image. (I did this prior to story boards because the idea was so gross)
The last problem really had to do with content. I wanted this to look full with lots of things happening. I wanted the band to be the focus to a degree so that ruled out filming other people. Filming a bunch of people also could lead to problems down the road, and could potentially be a huge time eating behemoth. I do know how to animate traditionally, so mixed image manipulated photos were going to have to cut it. In order to hide the fact that I was using photos with limited animation, I needed to change the scene every 11-16 seconds to keep things visually interesting. The song is 4:41, or 281 seconds, which if I wanted each scene to be 15 seconds long it would give me around 19 scenes total. Making a narrative out of the overall video given the stuff I had already made was going to be a creative stretch. One idea was the boy scout with a giant eyeball for a head, running around in every scene trying to earn some sort of merit badge.
The storyboards were pretty funny, but the problem was time. The band wanted to get the video done in 4-6 weeks. I was already at week 2 at this point, so I couldn’t go this route. I decided that in order for me to be the most effective I need to create 18 visually interesting scenes that I could fit the band into. Some of the footage that Sam and Robert had sent reminded me of karaoke, and it’d be really rough to do the entire song like that in 4 weeks, the chorus sections would be really easy! So I sketched a bunch of things on paper, and off I went. The Beefamid I had constructed was pretty much good to go, so I worked on incorporating it into the beginning of the video.
At this point It was the weekend before GDC started. I was 3 weeks deep, and I started to get worried that I wasn’t going to be able to get all the scenes assembled together in three weeks. I mapped out my placement of scenes in Final Cut, and it was looking pretty empty. Here is an example of what I mean.
4 weeks into the project, the band had yet to receive the mastered version of the song. This is when I started running into problems with my computer. I had been working on what would have become the guitar solo part, but my Macbook Pro I had owned for 9 months bit the dust. I had initially motion tracked a particle emitter to the end of Sam’s guitar, spraying donuts. The prism part was still in tact. Come to find out much later the second half of the karaoke/gingerbread house scene was also mangled. Here is the version that had graham crackers shooting out of the grass.
I was pretty upset, but a new fancy computer was fun.
Robert and Sam were pretty pleased on where I was at so far, and wondered if I wanted to take a shot at doing the cover. I shifted gears pretty hard here, and designing the cover was going to set the music video back a bit. I wasn’t about to pass up this opportunity either.
TO BE CONTINUED! (Probably Wednesday…)
for your information, you need an intern. you work way too hard for your own good and you need to keep your gigantic throbbing brain free for other types of madness. I want you to know if you need any work done, call my ass up. i can always borrow a butt load of equipment. You need all the help you can get. Keep going your shit is incredible