Forever, Never Tired
This project was created in 2010 as a live video challenge.
School: Academy of Art University, San Francisco
Department: Computer Arts, VFX
Class: Compositing for Motion Graphics 2
Instructor: Colin Evoy Sebestyen
“Memento Mori”
Creative Brief:
We will be creating a collaborative video project for San Francisco based musician Edison. Edison has been gracious enough to lend us audio stems for our visual experiment. The piece will be broken into sections and handed off to different designers. Each section of the track will be broken into individual pieces for each of the designers.
We will break into 3 teams and share assets and art direction.
Each team will be given an A section and a B section to produce. These design elements need to work together overlaid in add or multiply blend mode, as well as work individually as pieces of design. As such, this will be a design challenge of designing in systems and layers.
Art Direction:
Each team will receive the same design packet containing typefaces, color palettes, and art direction. Each team is required to use the elements in the art kit, and then also incorporate 3 additional design elements of their own concepts into the system. Each team can draw from their customized art kit for their animations.
Art Kit concepts and elements:
• Human skull scanned from a high quality cast using DavidLaserScanner software
• Aller Type family
• Platonic primitives
• Utilize the 30 60 90 diagonal system in the Smile HD Gridsystem as a guide in AE and in C4D for the basis of your animation
• Optional type-
Two stanzas typical of memento mori in mediaeval music are from the virelai ad mortem festinamus of the Catalan Llibre Vermell de Montserrat from 1399:
“Vita brevis breviter in brevi finietur,
Mors venit velociter quae neminem veretur,
Omnia mors perimit et nulli miseretur.
Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus.”
“Life is short, and shortly it will end;
Death comes quickly and respects no one,
Death destroys everything and takes pity on no one.
To death we are hastening, let us refrain from sinning.”
Audio sync technics:
2D or Keyframe animation-
Set markers or keys and hand animate parameters of your design elements. Examples include: 2D animation in Flash and assigning these elements as materials on your geometry inside C4d.
Sound Effector:
To create movements based on the sound with your audio amplitude, you may import the stems via the sound effector and pipe the output from the sound effector into your mograph objects, or to any parameter inside Cinema4d utilizing expresso, and the mograph sample data node.
Post Production:
To create visual sync with your animations based on the melody, you may create visual changes in post production utilizing After Effects. You can achieve this parametrically using the keyframe assistants > convert audio to keyframes or Trapcode’s soundkeys, or just tap in the rhythm and do it by hand. Examples of these visual changes in post production include: driving masks, effect on layers using adjustment layers, or reintroducing 2D elements from your art kit back into the composition.
Due Next Week:
• Designs and additions to your team’s art kit
• Sketches for motion
• minimum 3 test sound sync renders utilizing the mograph module, cloner objects, and effectors, using simple platonic objects as your clones.
Due in two weeks
• Renders “A Section”
Due in three weeks
• “A” Section revisions
• Renders “B Section”
Digital Files:
• Don’t forget to bring copies of the digital files you used for every assignment. These files may become valuable tools when troubleshooting files with problems. If you do not bring your files, it will not be possible to take the time to solve your problem.
Thank You!