EFX Animation

Ghost, Animated Music Video

My Oldest Friend and Lotus Mountain Creative present: Ghost. An audio-visual feast. Would love to hear feedback on how you feel it turned out! For this post I wanted to look back on the process, share what went into it, and do a post mortem on what went right, what went wrong, and lessons learned!

Jacob and I started discussing the project back in Feb of 2018. He gave me this brief description for the tone he wanted:

“Most of the imagery that I’m drawn to is nostalgic and a bit sad. Like a children’s melody, with a deep dark undercurrent. I like the idea of big empty epic spaces, or ruins, that remind the viewer of a time long past. A sense of things being much bigger than you. More like a psychological, rather than explicit horror: something dangerous is lurking, a presence is felt. There is uncertainty, and vulnerability. Like a child seeing the vastness and scariness of the world.

In this sense I’m always drawn to images from The Never Ending Story, and the video game Silent Hill 2.”

This was one of the early successes and was one of two main reasons this project was so enjoyable. Jacob and I shared this pure vision, and the ideas we cycled through to stay in budget always resonated. The second aspect that kept the work enjoyable was that Jacob trusted my process and creative decisions. This was as much my video as it was his. It’s success was mine as well as his. One pitfall of this was my willingness to go beyond the scope of the budget in order to fulfill my grand ideas of the video that was creatively pouring out of me.

It wasn’t until October of 2018 that work began.

The story came in a burst of inspiration. I attribute the ease of the boarding process to the long gestation period in which ideas matured in my subconscious. This resulted in a mixed success however. In a normal production, storyboards will be crafted, edited into an animatic, cut, refined, and this process doesn’t end until each individual shot is rough animated, and the editing is further refined. By having a really solid storyboard pass I saved time and budget, almost keeping the timing of individual scenes exactly in the final edit. Not more than a second of final rendered material was cut.

Early in the animation process I envisioned anime-style limited animation (6-8 frames per second), but the budget wouldn’t allow for the hyper inflated clean up required. This one scene ended up taking almost 1/5 of the overall budget!

Production finally wrapped in Feb of 2020. Unfortunately almost a exactly a year later than my original estimate/delivery goal. The video was met with a moderate amount of interest, being featured in a handful of Canadian music online publications and receiving a minimal amount of attention from un-promoted social media posts. Many film festivals were canceled, and the rest were relegated to online ‘events’ because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Not knowing how much attention a film would get under these conditions we chose not to enter it into film festivals. Unfortunately this made the debut of the video feel underwhelming and it’s impact, if any, quickly faded.

Looking back at the final product after more than a year out of the trenches I have a few final thoughts and changes I’d make. Creating smooth frame by frame animation takes skilled and patient craft work that unfortunately was too much for me to lend to the project out of pocket. The boards told a complete story that was hard for me to want to deviate from. The result was that many scenes in the second half of the video have almost no animation, and many character poses and final art is sub par. There are some early scenes that are almost to the quality I aspired to make the whole video. If I were to do the project over again with the same budget I would make these two dramatic changes.

Focus on a small number of key animations and really polish them. High frame rate (12 fps), tight line-work. Then re-edit the film to fill run time with large chunks with beautiful but easy to generate loops and ambient shots. Slow pans of environment, hypnotic animations like butterfly’s and walking, etc.
Edit the film to hit the beats of the song. Originally I had wanted to create a short film with Ghost as the soundtrack. I made a conscious choice that the editing wouldn’t ‘dance’ with the music beyond one notable exception, when the woman’s foot falls in a dramatic emotional shift in the song. I believe if the budget had allowed for fully animating and polishing the entire film, this choice would have been preferred, and have highlighted that the music was ideal to use as a film soundtrack. But audio and visuals ‘dancing’ together looks and feels good, and is a quick and easy way to enhance the experience.

I am considering doing a cut of the film edited to the beats of the song, and will post and share if and when! Thanks for going on this journey with me. -Peter

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Music Video Trailer Released!

I was deep into storyboarding for this project this time last year, and am finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Just got this trailer cut together by my friend Chris Finch and am excited to share it!

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Music Video Progress!

This is so rewarding and a great project to learn and grow from. This sequence is the product of about 2 months of work, including storyboards, animatic, color boards, animation, compositing. It is a short clip from the film (also has the most going on during this sequence too). Here are some of the steps along the way that it took to get here!

Woo! These storyboards were some of my favorite to create. I had discussed ideas and had a good amount of time to cultivate elements of what I wanted this video to look like. Then during an event called “Inktober” I blasted through on a wave of inspiration to storyboard the entire video with only 1 frame being scrapped from the project. 50 storyboards for a 4 minute animation.

Here is a quick look at some of the progress from there.

First, experimenting with a few scenes to find the final cleanup style

This was a lot of work in itself! Some things I discovered: Backgrounds were going to be more important than I first assumed. Even though he is walking through a big empty mostly black space, there needs to be something in the background to give depth and grounding. So I have a few backgrounds now to work with, especially when he gets close to the glowing pod. And there will be lots of particles and smoke vfx.

Next, I moved on to completing a whole sequence. Here you can see the animatic. Followed by some individual frame renders and a background (foreground?) for an upcoming scene. Findings here: The budget for this project is very small, so I am looking to cut time and effort without cutting quality as much as possible. One thing I found was that having the animation remain on a low frame rate looked great with the final compositing and camera movement. I am going to be able to use most of the animation from the animatic as rough animation and clean up straight from there. Time saver!

Once again, here is the sequence in progress, rendered from After Effects:

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Science!

Here is a highlight reel from some earth science videos I helped produce for Western Governors University. A few illustrations were used from Getty Images (lemonade stand, soccer ball, bowling ball, background for the penguin flying), but almost all of it is designed, illustrated, and animated by myself. Voice of the science guy character is me, too.