Music
A universal language
It brings us closer together, no matter the distance.
An animated loop to uplift and serve as a reminder that our innate appreciation of music connects us all, no matter our race or location. We're more in tune with each other than we may think
Behind The Scenes
Let's have a closer look at some earlier stages of the final piece.
The task was tough. Five individual artists from all over the globe, each one set up with totally different skills, thrown together randomly to create one piece of visual.
At first we were all quite shy and didn't really know how to put this to paper, but after a while we found a decent path to walk on and pretty much agreed very soon after our first brainstorming that we wanted to create a seamlessly looping video that shows how music can connect people around the world.
Step 1: Finding a music loop to work with. Luckily we could use this awesome positive-vibes song by artist "Flitz & Suppe" who is a friend of Johannes
After we had found a song that we all felt positive with, it took us a couple of brainstorming sessions more to visualize how the loop could look. We somehow agreed on including a subject (a person) to captivate the viewer and make the visual as interesting as possible.
Step 2: A first pre-visualization: A VERY rough sketch of what could be the way to go. :)
In our next session we developed the idea of a person dancing in the loop, or even three characters dancing the same choreography. This way we would build up a strong visual connection between different people, which would be a perfect symbol of our desired message, that music connects the world.
As a next step, Hazel met up with her talented friend, Sarah Rowe, who is a dancer, and she developed the choreography for our characters.
One of the dance sketches, of which then Xi created the movements of the characters
After the dance choreography was created, Xi was the one to develop a more detailed storyboard, which brought us a huge step forward and closer to our final visual. The idea was to start in space, then go down to earth, show the characters all around the globe, and then switch back to space.
Step 4: The Storyboard brought us way closer to the final visual.
As a next huge step we needed to create the characters. Mia designed three very appealing characters. Since three of our team members were skilled in drawing, we decided that we wanted to have each of them to animate one character.
Step 5: Character design
Step 5: Rough character animation
Step 5: Refined animation
Another step was to find good photos to match the flipping background. As we did not want to use stock photos, Johannes tried to browse through his archives to find photos that could fit the criteria. We wanted to represent the world, so we were in need of both nature and urban surroundings. Luckily Johannes had traveled a lot in the past ten years so we could somehow display this idea through the photos he found. A little challenge was to find photos that would work with the perspective of the visible ground and the dancing characters.
As we did not have a photography timelapse to portray the time shift from day to night, Hazel decided to draw it as animation frames in Fresco. Turned out pretty cool!
Painted background animation by Hazel
Production Screenshots
Some more impressions of some final steps of the progress in creating this visual piece.
The fabulous astronaut is a trademark of Guoxin, and we were so happy we could include it in our visual. He also created the cover image for the Behance project page.
Xi Ding overtook the overall video editing to piece everything together.
