I’ve spent the last few weeks not being creative and working on getting my businesses website looking sharp. I can’t afford to pay a real web guy so I drew on my knowledge of CSS and web design from Uni and pulled this design out of my arse. I’m very happy with it. In the past when people asked if they could see my work I would send them to this website out of embarrassment. Now THIS website is the embarrassment. I’ve actually been meaning to revamp this site too. I have a cool idea for it. Next time I have 2 weeks free I’ll do it. For now you you check out the new www.awesomefighter.com.au and probably pay me to make you a website too.
I’m doing a series of presentations at Charles Campbell College for their Multimedia Program. It was my old high school and I am talking about the steps you can take after high school to continue doing Multimedia as a career. Although I don’t consider myself as successful as I would like to be, most of the people I studied with in the past are thinking of quitting because they can’t find work. I, on the other hand, have enough work to be constantly working on something. The presentation is set out from when I was in year 11 and my ‘journey’ to how I got to where I am today. The main thing I tell people is to spend their time working on something, and finish it, even if it sucks. Then repeat until you make something you like. It’s a philosophy I stole from Ira Glass. To illustrate my point I dug up most of my not so good High School animations and I’m going to put them here.
Today I have been looking at Motion Graphics and Kinetic Typography for an upcoming project. Motion Graphics have been appearing more and more on television. It’s one of those art forms that looks incredibly easy, and I’m sure it’s not. There are some examples of amazing Kinetic Typography and Motion Graphics that fit the audio perfectly and are really engaging. Others are just plain awful.
To me it’s bizarre that there can be such a leap in quality considering Kinetic Typography is literally animating worlds fly across a screen, a process that seems far less demanding and labour intensive than any other forms of animation. Today I’ve been trying to figure out what attributes make a good piece of typography and what makes a bad piece. I’m going to look at 3 different ways people use kinetic typography. I’ll write a little about the pro’s and cons of each one in the hopes I’ll get some ideas for my own project, and know what to avoid.
Movie Quotes
Say What Again by Jarratt Moody was the first piece of Kinetic Typography I can remember seeing. I don’t think I had even seen the film Pulp Fiction at the time. Moosy’s video uses different colours and fonts to represent each character. But what’s really impressive is how the author has used the sizes and order of different words to guide the eye into reading the text at the same intensity as the words. This is partially because of clever framing. Overall what’s impressive is the design of the ‘slides’. The author knows how to draw your eye to all the right words. He sometimes moves the camera on each Sylabil. It’s like specific words are accented notes in a piece of music and the camera aggressively darts to each new word when necessary.
The contrast between the colurs of the text and the background work well, the font is well chosen, easy to read. While the movie is often fast paced we are never lost to keep up with the words. It’s visually clear and appealing, which seems to be they key to good typography. The only exception for this is “THEYSPEAKENGLISHINWHAT” which pans across the screen so quickly it’s nearly impossible to read. Without the aid of the audio it would be impossible. Because the scene is one character not understanding another this is perfectly acceptable from a narrative perspective.
The author has also used a hierarchy in the text and colour, where the small baby blue and round font represents the weaker character and the large sharp edged manilla font is the more powerful aggressive character. The blue font never takes up a large portion of the screen while the manilla quickly fills the screen and the camera has to quickly readjust the framing to keep up with it. The exception is where the blue character has been shot and cries out. His cries fill a large portion of the screen and the background turns red to indicate blood or pain.
From this point on the roles are reversed. Now the blue fonts is larger than the manilla. The blue character is in pain and desperately shouting. There are fewer fast paced jumps and cuts, the camera smoothly follows the words, possibly as a way to indicate how cool and collected the Manilla character is despite the fact he has just shot someone.
Moody is also attentive to the audio that the text is mimicing. The blue character grunts, gasps and stutters after being shot. The author has included all of these sounds as typography, sourrounding them with dripping blood. Even when we are following the domineering text of the manilla character the gasps of “No!” are seen in very small letters before being left behind on the camera pan.
The camera also plays on our expectations of reading. We read left to right starting from the top of the page to to bottom of a page. We read along lines. The film features physical margin like lines across the screen and pans along them. We follow the text the same way we would read the page of a novel. Occasionally the camera will turn 90 degrees and will follow a different line.
After the gunshot, all the text is on a 45 degree angle. This could be the typographical equivalent of a Dutch Tilt. Meaning that the camera is tilted slightly on a subject to show something is wrong or askew with a situation. Perhaps it is also to defy convention in some way, to put the audience on their toes.
The most interesting thing about typography is that, to me, it feels like we are reading a map (or being shown a map.) Part of me is trying to navigate your way through the words. Remember what way up. Each tilt and turn take you further away from the start.
Many of Moody’s techniques are repeated in Andy Jones animation ‘Jerry Maguire Motion Graphics Sequence’. The black characters text is brown on a white background. The white characters text is white on a brown background. We can recognise the character based on the colour of the text (but not the font). Both films use a very similar colour scheme and feature a vinaigrette around the text. Both video’s also run at a high frame rate and use what looks like a CC Motion Blur effect which makes the video look very smooth.
Like Moody’s animation, Jones uses the size of the text to show both the volume and intensity of the delivery of each word. One other interesting technique Jones uses (only once) is to take a letter from an existing word to create a new word. He fades out all the letters “VERY” except E and turns it into HELL. It’s not really used for any clear reason.
What Jones introduces that Moody didn’t incorporate is 3D space. Moody’s piece follows 2 dimensions, up/down and left/right. Jones starts the same way. His camera work is smoother though, probably due to the relaxed nature of the scene, his camera floats around and gently eases into many of the slides. Jones knows the importance of the words “Show me the money”. In fact the words “Here it is” pull away from screen, much like a stage curtain reveal. Only there is nothing and then we are pulled FORWARD, not just zoomed in, we are moving through physical space to “Show me the money”.
Music Videos
So let’s move onto music videos, which is the kind of production I will be making. What I find interesting about this piece, titled Blink 182 – Online Songs Kinetic Typography, is that the author (who has called themselves Jerry on their YouTube account) was learning how to use After Effects as they went, and you can see a huge improvement in his skills as the video progresses. I will talk about the initial flaws of this video and then the improvements toward the end.
The camera is afraid to hold on any of the first word for too long. The word “Jose” appears and we instantly zoom into it, before we have had much time to read the word. I also don’t really like the blue colour or the font, which looks like impact. Staying away from generic fonts like this will stop people from making the mental leap that that your video is also generic.
The way the words appear is initially confusing to an eye taught to read left to right. “You’re My” appears inside a letter, and then “Source of Most” appears around it. It reads okay but camera then pans to a new frame for the word frustration. The word is pulsing and throbbing, presumably to show frustration. To me this is unnecessary, as the delivery of the word is not angry or frustrated. The way the words appear on screen should reflect the actual audio and not the intent of the words of phrase.
The next line “Forget.. when I… don’t meet ex-pec-tations” is already a significant improvement. The camera now holds on the words for the right amount of time. The effect when the words appear to be on a box is overused nearly right away. The camera also will not stay still, it’s constantly rotating around words which looks cool, but doesn’t match the delivery. When people watch typography they are reading. When you make it to difficult for them to read, they want to give up and do something else. It’s hard to read something that’s moving. It’s okay to make it difficult to read if it’s also difficult to hear, but the audio is very clear in this part. The sequence for “In the end we all blamed you” (at 0:12 for those playing along) allows us to focus on the text for long enough and despite the fact the camera moves so quickly, we still are able to read each word with the text.
When the text piles up like a tower and the camera zooms up, kind of off balance, this shows depth of shot very well and fits (0:14). Then the camera leaps from the top of the words and fall into the same trap of the camera not sitting still as it introduces the members of the band.
Around 30 seconds in, the background changes from bue to black. This is when the first verse starts. It’s a technique used in both Moody and Jones pieces and it works. It makes us feel like we are progressing though the video. Staring at the same black word, blue background for too long becomes visually uninteresting and it changes just in time. We have now reached a new part of the video which is significantly better than the last part. The text follows a logical left to right pattern, although it is written across the screen in an uninteresting way. “Why do you still keep it-” is straight left to right, probably so when the word “around” appears and the camera turns upside down we see the effect cleared. This could have been achieved in other ways.
In my opinion typography is better when it is looked at like a single slide that words appear on instead of following words across a screen. It allows unused words to be disposed of. When a sentence is over, the words should not be seen any more. The words “Why do you still keep it around” are still on screen long after the have been said. Especially now that the song has picked up, we should be moving though words quickly to match the rhythm. In short, the words are too small. Fast cuts and pans creates the illusion of urgency which would have matched this part perfectly. Instead we have long tracking shots on the text. This problem could have been solved by making the text fill the entire screen.
There is also far too much white space in this sequence. From a designers perspective there is a place for white space in typography but the shapes the words make are too strange and it creates this weird negative space when we zoom out and can still see it in the background. Jerry corrects this with the lines “But I gotta wonder why you’d leave it out for me”. The words are packed neatly together, can be read easily, and there is even a graphic which backs up the words (more on that in the next piece). My only complaint is that there is no variation or hirechy when the words appear. While easy to read it’s visually uninteresting but still marks a huge improvement from the pacing of first part of the video.
We are then shown several of images from messenger chat programs, grahpics which fit the theme of the song. We also see the band, which I personally thing was unnecessary. Although how do you effectively fill parts of a typography music video when no words are being said? I don’t have the answer at this stage. Maybe some of the next videos I look at will have solved this problem.
Let’s move forward to the next part at 0:50, where Jerry gets another chance to use the “around” trick at the new line “Why am I still hanging around”. The text is much better, we have variation in the colour (something the Moody did in his piece), the pacing is good. The white space is used more effectively (not great though) and the word down physically drops, a neat little touch. The graphic of a sad face beats with the drum kit. The more we zoom out, the less white space we have. We see more still graphics. On the guitar we drop forward again. This is one of the strengths of the video. There’s a real sense of weight to the camera. The floating camera, which was previously annoying, is like us floating up, higher and higher, the depth of field gives s the impression we are high up and then we are dropped. It’s a very effective use of an XY and Z axis and matches the intended effect of the guitar slide. It’s like when your stomach drops on a roller coaster, the feeling of being heart broken. It matches the song perfectly.
I the next sequence (1:00) Jerry has figured out exactly how big to make the text. It fills the screen well. The camera constantly rotates 90′s degrees but it matches the intensity of the song. He also starts using lines to draw out eye to the right parts of the screen. My only complaint with this part is that the graphics he has used are different colours to the text. In my opinion this interferes with the established colour scheme and the contrast between the background and text.
The second verse at 1:10 seconds, Jerry pacts the text together, has variations in font size and colour. It’s works much better. The camera zooms out again to the drum beat. Instead of reacting just to the intensity of the words, Jerry utilises camera movements reacting to the beat of the music itself. Perhaps this is a good way to fill wordless sections of music. I’ll skip ahead to the end of the video where it appears to be far more professional.
Jerry uses a technique where he drags words and letter from the background into the foreground to build the words of the song. It’s a great technique. The colour of the background also starts changing with the chords of the song. It’s like the background is the rhythm, the words are the melody and the camera movements are the drum beat. Graphics of instant messenger appear and are getting pulled apart by the text, it’s hard to keep up with everything but it doesn’t matter. At 2 minutes in we return to the technique of rearranging letters to form the words, except it’s matched up with crash zooms, letters are being used by flipping them upside down. The impact of the camera zooms physically breaks words and pushes the letters off screen. The camera shakes with the beat. We pull out and revel we were in a computer and the video ends. Phew! What a great finish.
Educational
How can we talk about typography without talking about Patrick Clair, the artist behind the amazing motion graphics on Hungry Beast? He calls them info graphics, and because there is usually little text, I supposed typography isn;t the right word of these. Clair’s videos are what appear to have brought typography into the mainstream in Australia. Since then Clair’s work has appeared on The 7PM Project and Can of Worms. Hungry Beast has done something very unique with typography where they use the ‘journey’ or ‘trail’ of images and words to form one final picture. It’s kind of like ASCI art.
Usually Hungry Beast relies more on images than words. This is probably because the intent of the piece is to educate us. It’s more more interesting to see images that relate to the commentary than the same words. It was usually 2 dimensional like Moody and Jones, until he made this piece:
Suddenly we have 3D graphics, a more complicated colour palette. His imagery is imitating real things like microscopes, clear sheets, military documents. I can’t keep talking about this because I have to go to work. I’ve got some good ideas now though so I guess this blog has served it’s purpose.
Over the past month I’ve been working on a series of animated shorts for a website entitled Mend-A-Friend. the site’s objective is to teach University and High School Students how to communicate with their friends effectively if they suspect they are going through a tough time. The Project was funded by Adelaide University and we were working with Catherine Leehy (the projects creator) and Traffic Creative who designed the website.
The project was a lot of fun. The very appealing characters were designed by Tim Cannan. The fabric cut out look gave us an opportunity to experiment with new techniques for animation. After looking at the behind the scenes materials of a short film entitled Something Left, Something Taken from Tiny Inventions, I was inspired to try and create my own After Effects Rig. To be honest it was much easier than I thought it would be. I have used Maya to make 3D Rigs which is fairly complicated but a 2D rig is much simpler. My own Rig was very basic and took a few days to do. I would like to try my hand at this again some time soon, a more advanced rig would be very useful for a larger project.
There were 4 Characters to rig and a good animation friendly rig would take around a week to complete. Our Animators are also not as familiar with After Effects as I am. You can see there were some problems with the Rig, where gaps would appear for no reason. I figured out how to fix this problem during compositing (I put a large picture of Paul McCartney behind the characters so the tool detected it as additional Mesh to distort). In the end the idea of using an After Effects had to be abandoned. The potential for things to go wrong was far to risky. In the end we animated each character in Flash like we usually do. We added in the fabric like the Scarf, Hat Flaps and Hair in After Effects, which were animated using the Pin Puppet tool.
I have been planning to create a children’s cartoon for a while and in some ways this project was a way to test the waters to see what is possible using After Effects and Flash.
I have been trying to set clear goals for each project I take on this year. Goals that by meeting will allow me to be a better Director/Freelancer/Person. For this project I set two goals. 1. Stick to the schedule and 2. Love the Project. The second one is really corny and I’m slightly embarrassed to commit it to paper… Cyber paper. I supposed I should offer some explanation. Animation projects take a long time to complete. You often are up until horrible hours of the morning working and it’s always tempting to cut corners. If you are really passionate about a project though, you will go that extra mile. You’ll come in on weekends, work until late, neglect your friends and family and health all in order to get the project done as you want it. We did this on Livin’ With Steve and, as you can probably tell my reports on each episode, the only problems I have with that project were restrictions based on my own artistic abilities and lack of experience. I did learn from Zombie Train and make sure the entire project was planned carefully (particularly Pre-Production).
I did all the Post Production on this project with the exception of the Good Question Phrasing and Bad Question Phrasing Animations. I Animated 4 of the 8 Episodes which you can see below.
It was my big (age wise not width wise) sisters birthday in March and she told me she wanted a Ukulele * so she could be just like her cool little brother. She has also been telling me for years that I should draw a cartoon of her.
So I painted a picture of her on a Ukulele and it took all bloody afternoon. Guys, painters don’t ever tell you this; but painting is hard. I know we all look at those dripping clocks, the half smile lady and the can of soup and say to our significant other “Pffffttt, I could do that this afternoon if I had the time. But those leaves wont sweep themselves.” Let me tell you sir stroke madam, you are wrong on both accounts. Painting takes forever, that’s why you barely see any paintings anymore. And leaves will sweep themselves, the wind basically blows them away.
*presumably
**Fun fact: This whole post was made using only my phone, charm and good looks.
I wrote a lot about Episode #1 of Livin’ With Steve a few weeks ago, now onward to the second instalment of this smash hit Livin’ With Steve franchise. This week I’ll be talking about the second episode Bakin’ With Steve. This is actually one of my favourite episodes, I like the simple story and visually I think it is one of the more appealing episodes. It’s not without it’s problems though, which I will go into soon. First I’ll talk about where the idea came from.
When we finished making the Livin’ With Steve pilot episode, we put together a 13 episode series bible in a very short amount of time. I wont go into the specifics for why this happened, but the series bible took all night to put together and we had to pitch as many ideas for episodes as we possibly could in a short amount of time. The conversations would literally go like this.
JONNY: “Ummm, what if Nate gets a pet flamingo.”
LEVI: “Nah.”
JONNY: “What if Nate throws a bake sale?”
LEVI: “BRILLIANT!”
That is how the premise of this episode came into being. It wasn’t until I saw Sweeny Todd when the idea for this episode was really developed properly.
The Plot
I thought Nate unwittingly grinding people up and serving them as pies was a funny idea. I still do. Here is where I think we went wrong with the episode, and in some ways with many elements of the series. At its core Livin’ With Steve is a very dark idea. The whole point of the show is that it starts off light hearted and fun and then, as each episode progresses, we reveal Nate obliviousness is a scary fabrication he has invented to cope with his depressing reality. We show that there is a screw loose in Nate and we slowly uncover the depths of his insanity. In my opinion, Livin’ With Steve never really pulled off the darkness it was supposed to. What really would have made this episode is more disgusting shots of Nate cutting people up and making them into pies, pushing corpses through a meat grinder, stirring a big disgusting pot of human remains (this one sort of made it in). All while thinking (impossibly) that he is having a lovely bake sale with his best bud. Each episode should have had that childlike innocence mixed with a horrible darkness beneath it.
The idea that the pies were infected was another idea I thought of. This was more of an idea to forward the plot of the episode and the whole series. The story of season #1 was always meant to have the zombie virus spreading through town. I wanted it to be Nate’s fault that it happened though. His obliviousness completely destroys the life of those around him and has almost no consequences to his own life. This episode very nearly achieved this. This is another episode where I underestimated how confusing the plot idea is. Often when we were writing episodes I insisted that each plot had to have something slight askew about it. It’s not a tired old plot device (like a bake sale). It has a twist on it. Almost like it is making fun of those contrived sitcom type stories. However, to make that apparent in this episode you have to establish several premises.
1. Nate has a bake sale.
2. Steve kills someone,
3. Nate makes that person into pie meat,
4. Nate feeds the infected pies to customers,
5. The customers become zombies,
6. The zombie customers crave human flesh,
7. Nate is making pies that are made from human flesh.
8. Nate has to find more human flesh to feed the zombies so they don’t eat him (and Steve).
THAT is what this episode should have been. It has to take a series of steps to go from the boring premise of ‘Bake Sale’ to the dark premise of ‘Nate finding human flesh to feed to a horde of zombies.’ The problem is there are too many steps between these two premises to cover in our run time of 2 minutes (I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t blame the run time). Instead, the episode is like this
1. Nate has a bake sale.
2. Steve kills someone,
3. Nate makes that person into pie meat,
4. Nate feeds the infected pies to customers,
5. The customers become zombies,
6. The zombie customers crave human flesh,
7. Nate runs out of meat.
It never reaches that level of darkness that we should have pushed for. In retrospect the episode should have gone like this:
1. Nate has a bake sale.
2. Steve somehow infects the pie batch.
3. Nate feeds the infected pies to customers,
4. The customers become zombies,
5. The Zombie customers starting maiming and killing people in front of Nate.
6. Nate is makes pies that are made from human flesh to keeps the zombies happy.
7. Nate has to find more human flesh, doesn’t bother with pies anymore, to feed the zombies so they don’t eat him (and Steve).
Ta-da! We have a transformed the premise completely. Actually, I’m still not convinced the run time of each episode allows us to establish bait and switches of each episodes premise. We tried to cover as much of the plot as we could in the pie making montage, which was sort of effective. We would still have to have a resolution to the premise. This episode would have been great with a 5 minute run time.
Now what was I talking about before this complicated tangent? Oh yes where the episode idea came from. The whole episode plot was formed so I could include one joke that eventually got cut. It went something like this;
NATE: “Wow Steve! We’re selling pies with a mysterious meat in order to pay our rent; this is just like that popular musical!”
STEVE: [GROANS]
NATE: “Yeah, it’s exactly like R.E.N.T”
Not the best joke. It got cut for a good reason.
Let’s talk about this episodes place in the arc of Livin’ With Steve. Last time I talked about the arc of the series and how the threat was that Nate and Steve would be evicted from their home. This is the episode that really sets that up as a possibility, when we introduce their angry landlord Mr Rhodes. Mr Rhodes was originally a once of character written for the episode that became Kitten Sittin’ With Steve (which I will cover in 2 weeks). On top of having a stand alone plot to the episode, this episode introduced the idea that Nate and Steve can’t afford to pay their rent and their landlord would be only too happy to evict them. This was supposed to be a running problem in the series. The reason Nate and Steve take jobs Acting, Cat Sitting, Burger Making is to pay their rent, but I don’t think this is very obvious. I heard and interview with Tim Hideker and Eric Wareheim (who would go on to make Tim and Eric: Awesome Show, Great Job! and Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie) and Bob Odenkirk (of Mr. Show) on the A Special Thing Podcast where they all spoke about the production of a show called Tom Goes to the Mayor.
Bob Odenkirk: “When we started this [Tom Goes to the Mayor] I argued with you guys a couple of times about how you kinda have to do the same thing in every episode, because you right away wanted to trash the format. Which is Tom goes to the Mayor and suggests something. But I think in this new season you found an amazing mix of sticking to that format enough that it’s a show, that it has this form. And then these episodes that either start there and veer off, or don’t start there and it doesn’t feel like they overwhelm or that you drop your template for the show.”
Eric Wareheim: “I think we started to embrace the idea of, coming back to that, the simple idea that Tom goes to the Mayor. … We started to really appreciate what that little moment is every single time.”
…
Bob Odenkirk: “David and I, when we started Mr Show, we didn’t come out and say hello, and we didn’t want to do it! Burnie Billstein, my manager, said “You have to do it. You have to do one thing at the top of the show that’s the same.” Python had the It’s Guy. Because otherwise every week it is just Craziness and you don’t know where it starts or ends.”
If we made all 13 episodes, we had many other plots (We had to cut one where Nate and Steve start a Death Metal Band with Steve as the lead singer) that reinforced the idea that they need money. Because there are only 4 ‘job episodes’ in a 7 episode series, the ‘let’s make money to pay the rent’ premise never seems constant. Really this is one of the biggest problems I have with the narrative of the whole series. It doesn’t feel like there is consistency or a running plot because we tried to do both.
I often wonder if this season would have been better without a running arc, if each episode could just stand on it’s own legs as something people can enjoy. I’m reminded of another series that was made along side ours entitled Mollusks: The Animated Series. It’s a very well written series and what makes it so effective is that there is only one plot. It’s like a short film that happens to be cut into episodes. Shaaark! has a different approach where there is no series arc (except for the love interest introduced in the first episode) but it has the consistent premise established in the introduction “A Shark, named Jacques, pronounced Shar, determined to inspire his fellow apex predators, to ride above their instincts and become more than mindless killing machines”. In Livin’ With Steve we tried to do both but the consistency is never established because nearly every episode starts off in a completely new setting.
Trivia and References
Australian viewers may recognise the pie customer’s likeness to Matt Preston, one of the judges from the Australian Master Chef. We actually had the real Matt Preston lined up to voice himself which sadly never came into fruition due to his busy schedule and our tight deadline.
Viewers of Australian Master Chef might notice the quick reference to a famous incident that happened on the television series. I love this moment in television. I could write a whole post about it. I will just say it’s the exact moment that everybody realised the loose definition of ‘Reality’ in Reality TV. It’s hilarious. If Livin’ With Steve is proof of anything it’s that I love corny jokes, and this is the corniest thing that has ever happened.
This episode could really just serve as a big set up to Episode #4. Because Mr. Rhodes is an angry old man sort of character we thought it would be funny if he is desperately attached to his cat. Then we thought it would be even funnier if he collects cat things the way an old lady would. Then we pushed it further and decided that it would be funnier if he was a closeted gay man but it never really comes up in the story. It’s just a little fact about his character which the audience can pick up on or ask questions about. He lives his own bizarre life; the only thing we get ever know about it is what Nate and Steve see. Thinking about it now, I think what I found so appealing about this idea is that it ties into Nate’s obliviousness. His landlord is a bit strange and Nate could probably ask a lot of questions about his lifestyle but he really just doesn’t care. I’ll talk more about Mr. Rhodes in Episode #4. My point is that we crammed as much cat stuff Mr. Rhodes shots as we possibly could.
Note Mr. Rhodes cat telephone and the picture on the wall behind him. We has an idea that instead of getting married, Mr. Rhodes consideres himself married to his cat.
Mr. Rhodes has a little Cat Bobble head on the interior of his car.
Finally there is the song ‘Sexy Disco Woman’ composed by Cam Blokland, who did almost all of the music for Livin’ With Steve. I asked him to write the most flamboyant funk/disco song he possibly could. He said he knew what I wanted nearly right away, made this song and I loved it. I want to release the full 2 minute version online one day. I liked it so much I had to put it in the outro credits. Another fun fact about Mr. Rhodes is that he is named after the character of the same name in George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead.
The photo montage was also a reference to the original Dawn of the Dead soundtrack. Romero uses a track entiteld ‘The Gonk’ which we gave to Cam to try and make a sound-a-like for. It’s a very subtle reference that nobody will ever pick up on.
That really all I want to say about this episode. I know it sounds like I’m shitting all over my own work when I look at these. I’m very proud of them and this really is one of my favourites. I feel like the only way to improve is to be as critical as possible of your own work. In the future I am going to try and write one of these BEFORE I write the script.
Anyway. I’ll write up Episode #3 (another favourite of mine) next week.
While I was working on Livin’ With Steve I was contacted by German metal band The Nitrogods to create a video clip for their new album. They sent me the song ‘Zombie Train’ and I loved it. They only had a small budget and they needed the video clip quite quickly. We took the job because we loved the song, we made it a passion project. This is the first production I have been involved in where I had to plan and produce the final product in a little over a month. My friend Jarrod Prince and I listened to the song a few times and had a big brainstorming session. Eventually this story about an underground train that travels through hell emerged. Sort of like Midnight Meat Train.
I think the real challenge of this production was to get it done on time. I know that sounds really obvious, but everything about the project- the story, the style, the shots- had to be carefully planned to ensue the video could be made in a month. The Nitrogods had an album launch on the 23rd of Feburary so we wanted to have the video clip complete and sent to them before then.
My goal of this video clip was to tell a short story without animating hundreds of shots. The song Zombie Train goes for 4 minutes and we had a crew of 3 (for the majority of the production). We used the music video for Rob Zombies American Witch as a reference. A video clip that, admittedly, is not the best in the world, but it does succeed in telling a story that fits the tone of the song, mostly through stills. We decided for our video clip most of the movement would be completed using After Effects instead of Flash. We hoped that interesting shots and visuals would replace the need for lengthy animated shots and save us time.
Another goal of mine was to use more interesting shots. The majority of Livin’ With Steve used the same flat angles to avoid having to redraw the characters too many times or have too many backgrounds (which you can read about here). Nothing is more boring than an animation with flat uninteresting angles. Animation gives you the freedom to be very creative with camera work and it feels like a missed opportunity not to take advantage of this freedom. To break this habit I tried to set out each shot with a clear foreground and background so it doesn’t feel like it takes place in a flat world. I wanted each shot to feel 3 dimensional, like it had real depth. Really the stand out part of the video is the backgrounds which Jarrod made. They make each shot look great (particularly the final shot) and allowed us to achieve the depth I wanted each shot to have.
Because this video takes place in two worlds (and because of the twist at the end) we wanted the train station world to have a dull blue and grey palette and the Zombie world to be red and black. I should have spent a little more time grading some of the shots properly as some are WAY TOO RED but for the most part I think it worked out. We also made the video grind house projector style to fit the music.
“Using all the modern technology and correcting every little mistake takes away from the edge and roughness that makes Rock´n Roll what it is.”
- From www.Nitrogods.de
To match the Nitrogod’s music, we decided the video clip itself should also be a gritty rough style of film making. The whole thing is designed to look hand shot, an effect we had played with before in Livin’ With Steve. We expanded on it slightly though.
To achieve a more realistic shaky cam look we exported the backgrounds, characters and foreground on different layers, put them onto 3D planes in After Effects and made a 3D Camera with a Wiggler on it. This made the camera move as if it was being held by a hand and allowed us to achieve a realistic hierarchy with our shots.
I could keep talking about behind the scenes stuff but I’m sure it’s boring. Next time I do a project like this I’m going to make sure we don’t start animation until we have the Animatic 100% locked down. The camera crosses the line a few times. Some shots are different to what I wanted them to look like but I didn’t go back and change them. The look and volumes of characters are not consistent and the lack of animation is painfully obvious in some shots. Most of these things were unavoidable due to the high pressure nature of the production but with a little extra love, this video clip probably would have been far better. The temptation to just keep the ball rolling on projects is really strong, often you can’t give the shots the love they deserve which is a shame. Pre-Production is so important though, and will fix so many issues before they even happen. An Animatic will allow you to see the story of the production much clearer. This is more a message for me than for you.
Lastly here are the original drawings I did of the band.
