on THE SUN

 Some thoughts on a new video. Watch it below:

I don't remember exactly where this idea came from. I think the image of someone running around a room while the light chased them was the first seed. I also wanted to include some faster, snappier animation like that entering the house bit, and try seeing the world from a 2d perspective, like when the character looks down at the house.

 

I actually did some very very quick 2d images for this video- one to base the character off of and one to understand the colors.

The colors one was very useful- Good to think out what I want rather than what I just guess. The character one was interesting. I eliminated the hairspike things since I wanted to focus on the face. I've been trying to move away from the mouth style I used to use, which is hard because the old way was soooo much easier. Now working with these faces I run into the issue of facial proportions, mouth rigging, etc. All a pain. I'm fairly happy with the face in the video, some shots it looks better than others, but it mostly works out. I like it when combined with my rendering setup which was monstrously complicated (for me). I'm using separate render passes a lot more now!

I made the music in a few hours one night. I've done composing before, and I actually find it kinda fun? There's a balance to strike with synths which is using enough new sounds but not too much to keep it sounding aesthetically consistent. My trick this time was to use the same synth tones with different envelopes, like the slow attack synth in the beginning becoming a pluck-ish synth later in the video. I tried to think of it as the sound associated with the sun.

My last note is on the slow-mo shot at the beginning. It's a risky shot to open on since it looks kinda choppy, and I think it probably affected video performance? I really really wanted a certain effect though, so I don't regret it. I wanted to emulate that bizarre slow mo that some films from the 90s and 2000s use, where it's like this choppy, motion blur smeared slow motion effect. Like they took some film frames and just extended them or something. Off the top of my head, Lord of the Rings does this, as well as Fallen Angels and also Chungking Express maybe. I can't really get motion blur in these renders, so I settled on an echo effect and slowing the footage down.

I have dissected this 20 second video like a frog!

There's more to say, namely about the potential of vertical video, but I'll save that for another blog post.