More Concept

Despite this idea seeming quite unoriginal for a Hip Hop video I think that the idea of having my facial collage moving through the neighborhood will still look quite fresh. I've been location scouting round my local streets/parks and I've found a few nice looking spots. After adding a few cool filters/effects we'll be in business! I'm still not sure how I want to present the face though, I've narrowed it down to three ideas.

The Concept, Scene 2, Take 1

Just had another brainwave regarding the presentation of the radio d.j. It's quite simple but it should work really well. I'll make a colorful and quirky radio out of card and make sure that the front has a large hole in it allowing you to see in. I'll line the interior with green card then I can add my footage of my radio d.j-filmed on the infinity curve-and hey presto my d.j is sitting in her listener's radio.

It should look a little like this

The Concept, Take 1.

As soon as I heard this tune there was one image in particular that popped into my head. To accompany the rapping, instead of simply filming someone doing the lyrics 100% live action, I will use an alternating mix of scribbly rotoscoped and live action eyes and mouths placed on top of the blacked out silhouette of someone's head. The live action elements will be from filming numerous different people. There will also be rotoscoped scribbly mouths for ears all the way through. Think ipod ad but with visible surreal facial features. Don't know what to do about the background yet or the rest of the video though, gimmie time....

Here's a little doodle.

Sound Advice

To make attributes of an effect or layer react to audio amplitude...

I start by creating a new composition and new solid. I need to generate audio keyframes so I go to keyframe assistant and then convert the audio to keyframes. Now a new layer of keyframes has been created and this is also represented by a null object in the project which we might as well move to one-side. If we look at the audio amplitude layer we see keyframes for both the left and right audio channels and for both (their mono signal). I then go to my new solid and say I want to effect the scale, I open up its transform options and holding the alt key I click on scale and now the expression controls are open for that parameter. I can now use the pick whip to link the scale to the amplitude of whichever channel I desire. Still it is often the case that the scale of the solid won't correspond nicely to the amplitude of the audio. We might not want the solid to be next to invisible when there are quiet patches. So we go back to the expressions of the solid and in the box for writing the expressions code we remap it. All this entails is clearing what's there and writing "linear" in lower case and then follow that with no space with (value,0,40,20,100) so the whole thing looks like this; linear(value,0,40,20,100). Please note that the numbers I've used in the brackets are only examples. The first two numbers are the original scale that the amplitude was adhering to so in this case the solid was at its largest when the audio was at 40 and was invisible at 0. Now it will always be seen at a corresponding size of 20 units and can go up to 100. These principles can be applied of course to pretty much anything keyable.

A Convenient Board

For some reason Heaven 17 appeared on the breakfast news on T.V this morning and my bleary eyes were bombarded with this video. It was all pretty cool but I'd say the shot at around 2.45 (pictured) might as well be a mood board for the idea that I've got in my head at this stage; loud and crude with simple compositing making for a slightly retro vibe.

Da Choon!

I've finally finalised the tune I'm using for my music video. I'm not a huge hip hop fan but for some reason I felt like doing a track with some rapping in it. When I heard this track, immediately I had quite a clear picture in my head of what this track's video should look like. There is just one snag, can't make out all the lyrics. I've emailed the artist and he said he'd send them to me but I'm still waiting so at the worst I'll be unable to have live action rapping for maybe a third of the lyrics. Not ideal but I feel it's a small price to pay for such a top tune.

Image Plane With Colour Scheme

Thought would add a few colours and make him so that I can use him as an image plane in Maya. I think I'll still do a few more drafts of him though and some concept art.