Whenever I’m out and about in the real world listening to music, I often try to imagine what a music video would look like for the respective song. I see where the song takes me and see what visuals pop into my head. I’ve also always had motion graphics as one of the sectors of graphic design where I’ve been more passionate. For this self-assigned passion project, I decided to finally attempt making a full length music video animation.
The song I chose to make into a video was a bit problematic. Us and Them by Pink Floyd is a great song and has always been one of the ones I’ve had an easier time envisioning, but it’s almost 8 minutes long. Animations of that length are always a bit of a grind, but I had enough passion and dedication to see this through that it really wasn’t that bad. Having a good idea of some of the scenes and the general vibe you’re trying to achieve really helps the process move along smoothly.
The first thing I did when I started this colossal project is create a spreadsheet of all the lyrics and instrumental segments and put an idea for a corresponding scene down. I knew that these notes were subject to change, but it was helpful to have jumping off point. Then, I made the majority of the assets in Illustrator and started putting them into the After Effects file. After hours of arranging, timing, adding more assets as needed and polishing, it was ready to go through the vigorous process of rendering it, getting feedback, fixing it and repeating.
While overall I am very proud of this project, I do acknowledge that it’s not perfect by any means. I would love to find a way to make the assets feel more dynamic and less static while still giving the desired “trippy” effect I was aiming for. I also wish I could figure out a method for the raining animations that was less taxing on my computer and thus the render time.
I learned a lot from this project. Not only did I learn and develop the patience required to do such a big animation solo, but I also learned a lot about the after effects itself. Messing around with the effects when trying to get the laggy effects from the final product helped me figure out a lot of cool stuff you can do in After Effects. I also learned the importance and power of compositions and having each unique element that you might want to reuse somewhere in a composition.