music

What am I getting myself into?

By skipgo ⋅ July 10, 2007 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Several months ago, while thinking of the possibilities of my new canon 20d, with the 5 frames per second burst mode, I decided to make a video for a smashing pumpkins song. I didn’t know which song, I didn’t know what kind of video. Something along the lines of the old INXS video, “what you need” (look it up on youtube!) was what I was thinking. For that video, which was made around 1985 or so, they shot the whole thing on a 35mm film camera in burst mode. Then they took each print, drew and painted on them, then shot each still on an animation camera. This is basically what I want to do now, only it’ll be cheaper because it’s all digital and fortunately I have all of the equipment and software needed.

The basic idea is to shoot a sort of stop-motion animation of some of my friends, (i haven’t figured out what they’ll be doing just yet, I’m still in the planning stages), then superimpose a handdrawn animation of the band performing, using photoshop. Of course, this will take roughly forever to complete, but I think it will be a fun little project.

So far I’ve completed a test-run on the animation portion. I drew 80 little pencil illustrations of Billy Corgan performing, then put the scanned images into iMovie, backed it with a clip of one of their new songs (the new album, Zeitgeist, is out today by the way…. I won’t bother with a review, as this blog is more about recommending music I love than it is critiquing said music…). The sound doesn’t match with the animation yet, I was just seeing how I would go about doing this sort of traditional style of animating, to see if i could get it to work. So far I’ve only got a 10 second clip (which took nearly 4 hours to make!!). Here it is:

I’ll continue to post updates as I go along, until I unveil the finished product. Any comments or suggestions are welcome!