Pre-Comping Animated Music Videos

For our final lesson before Christmas break, we were tasked to create a small 15 second clip of a song, and then the clips would be put together to make a 1 minute music video.

The music video would be created using pre-comping, in the style of Andy Shauf's 'The Magician'.

This music video is all created using pre-comps of other animated objects, landscapes and creatures. This was the building block of what we could take inspiration from, as well as what these pre-comping music videos can look like. We had a quick tutorial and lesson on the basics of pre-comping and little basic animations we can apply to these pre-comps and we were given 15 seconds of the song 'squares' by the Beta Band, and we began our pre-comping videos.

They was little to no time to plan for these 15 seconds of animation as we only had 1 and a half hours to complete our 15 seconds. I did a bit of research on the pre-comping music videos, and realized a few things that I needed to include in my 15 seconds. The main aspects of the videos that I wanted to mimic are changes in scene every 5 seconds of so, using a transition methods such as an object moving over the screen to transition to a new stage, or a directional movement to transport to a new stage. Also, the landscapes and background were given wobble effects, as well as a pattern effect, such as tartan or waves etc. This gives an artistic effect, even to common objects and scenes such as the sky, mountains, buildings and much more. Because of this information I decided I would have 3 different scenes of which would transition between each other. The part of the song I was making the music video for was about demons, and so the first scene I made included demons around a mountain, moving across the screen, as well as flying, of which I simply animated using the pin tool, and pre-comping the animations. The background for this scene included a wave effect and wobble. The screen transitioned using a cloud covering the screen and revealing a new stage. I started to run out of time at this stage, and the the other 2 stages didn't really relate to the first stage as I ran out of time to make my own complex pre-comped animations, so I used green screen effects from You tube. The transition between stage 2 and stage 3 was a zoom in to something black on stage 2, and a zoom out of something black on stage 3.

Next up we put all of the 15 second clips into 1 music video, and this is the final result.