Production: Adding Motion

Because I am not able to edit the next part of my video until the footage is filmed on Tuesday, a lot of my time has been spent on improving and perfecting the first part of my video. This has included responding to my audience feedback and also trying out different animations to see what works. 

I am still trying to overcome the issue of GIFs not being compatible with Final Cut Pro X. I have been using PNG images but these can prove difficult to make it look effective because they don't move! For example...

I added a seriously cute hedgehog to the bench scene yesterday. It is probably my favourite image yet! But it was so difficult to essentially 'embed' it into the scene. Although it is obviously a cartoon I wanted to make it part of the frame and unlike previous animations, I couldn't make it walk around or anything because it was sitting on the bench. 

Firstly I tried making it bounce up and down but it didn't look right at all. Although I asked my friend what they thought of it and they said they liked it, it looked messy and out of place. I decided to keep it in there for the meantime until I came up with a good alternative way to make it work. 

And then it came to me! I used the flip effect to make the hedgehog look left and right to the beat of the music. It worked out really well. There are 4 main beats to the frame and so I used the 'Flipped' effect to make the hedgehog change the way it was looking. 

I also mentioned my squirrel yesterday. I am beginning to add slightly more complex motions to my video now I have fully grasped the technique and so this squirrel runs onto the screen, sees an acorn, runs over and eats the acorn and then runs off of the screen. 

I found two images of squirrels. One was standing and the other was eating. I made sure they were a very similar colour and style of cartoon! Then the squirrel ran over to the acorn, the acorn disappeared (as did the squirrel), the eating squirrel appeared and bobbed up and down very quickly and then the original squirrel appeared again, but this time with the 'Flipped' effect on it, and ran off in the direction it came from. 

I am still continuing to add effects as I really want my film to be very animation-heavy. Over the next few days, whilst I have some spare time before filming my next bits of footage, I am going to continue researching my ancillary tasks so that I can begin them once I have completed the full first draft of my music video. 

Below is an updated version of my music video.