For the music video/audio sync project, I used a track I made previously for a Demoscene One Hour Compo, entitled "Dennis's Tile Emporium". I chose this track due to it being relatively simple, around a minute long and containing multiple different instruments doing different things.
One of the first things I do was go to Adobe Kuler and work out a colour palette. I then added a shade of green I thought worked with these colours, and white, I stuck to these colours in flat shades for the whole animation. This helped give it a very stylistic look.
In terms of influence, the game Rez for the sega Dreamcast played some part of influence, that was a game which was linked to the timing of the music. However my style is much less futuristic in some ways and is influenced by visual styles of the 70s and 80s. Some of it almost looks like the art associated with Children's Television programms.
Since I was limited to using only shapes and text in After Effects, I went for an abstract look. I founded several features of After Effects became useful here - for example if I chose a star or polygon path, there were a few interesting options I could play with, like making segments on the line(which I use for the Polygon which responds to the drumbeat towards the end) or chaning the inner and outer curvature. I could make a lot of interesting shapes like this, instead of just having a start with pointed ends, I could have one with rounded ends.
To start off, I divided my track into different Channels in modplug tracker, for the Drums, Bass, Lead instruments, etc. I exported them to different audio files for importing into After Effects. You can see what the track looks like in Modplug here -
I converted them to keyframes by clicking on the audio, selecting keyframe assisstant and convert to keyframes; so I had something to feed various shapes that would change in time with the music. This basically creates a series of running values that I can link to other values - such as the size of a shape. So basically it lets me have values go up and down with the intensity of the music.
The start of the animation is a little more simple than the rest, as the start of the track differs from the rest of it. It has a "chiptune" kind of sound to it, so I kept it simple with a square with rounded edges, and two "hill" shapes responding to the lead instrument(while the square responded to the drums). Towards the end of this section, I have a red circle that responds to the snare and hihats(this was done manually).
In the next section, the animation really starts up. I have a swirly red/pink line grow from the bottom left to the corner, which actually responds more or less to the "flow" of the Saxophone. I thought this worked quite well visually. I have an object called "Bass Sun" - which responds to the intensity of the Bass. Here I played with the Inner Roundness feature as well as inner and outer radius to give it a coiled wire like pattern around the edges.
I used a star shape on another layer. I had it come in but also "spin". To me, this fit with the "revving" sound of the Saxophone at the start. I copied this object to have another star come in at the end
After this, I cut to a "waves" effect, and move the Bass sun to the left. I play around with the values of this, and get it so the centre is circular, but with some rounded off triangles in the foreground. I make a similar shape, and colour it pink/maroon. I have the position of this change with the intensity of the saxophone. The problem with this is - it's very jumpy and not smooth like the rest of the video. So I looked around in the effects and found one called "Echo". This created multiple images of the triangle - as it would show where the triangle "had" been as well as where it is. This made the effect smoother, although it was not as pronounced as I would have liked. I would have prefered to have the echoes fade, but I couldn't figure that out at the time.
I have another squiggly line shape as a transition to the next scene - this time yellow and green. Previously I had not used green in the animation, so this helped it stand out.
The next part of the music had a Synthesiser come in, and do a pitch bend. The pitch bend reminded me of something zooming in - so I created a layer with a "Chequerboard" effect. Since it looked like a series of "Tiles" it fit with the name of the song. I played with the values until I more or less got it in time with the music. At the end of the pitch bend, there was a little riff, so I created an adjustment layer with an "Audio Spectrum" effect to respond to it. I repeated this twice. I also had it cut to the image of the two stars at the start, and the second time, I created a new white/pink star to represent the start of the synth part. I had this zoom with the chequerboard, then disappear when it became small.
I then transitioned to a "Particle Playground" effect. This is an effect that basically creates a fountain of different particles that come out. I originally had the velocity of this effect linked to the intesity of the Pizzicato strings that come in at this point - however this made rendering insanely slow, and it was a little pointless. Instead I used a clever trick to get it in time with the music - I looked at the BPM of the track I had made, and used that to work out beats per second and set the Particles to emerge at that speed. I doubled it to increase the intensity of the effect while still being in time.
I wanted to create some kind of object to responding to the Saxophone in this scene - created a kind of polygon that was gold on the outside(like a Saxophone) but had the crimson-ish colour on the inside. I then gave it a "Mouth" which would respond to it, as if it was singing the saxophone notes, I made it mostly change the Y height of the mouth so it would look like it was opening and closing, and also increased the line thickness a lot so it would appear more closed when I did this.
I created another "flow" object, only with this one I made the edges transparent. I also made it yellow and white. It had a much more fluid appearance because of how it moved and how the ends blended.
I ended by having various objects come in and act on time with the music, a pentagon with a dancing dashed outline responding to the drums, a foot tapping in general time with the music, another Bass sun responding to the bass, and another squiggly polystar responding to the flute that comes in at the end.
I had quite a bit of fun playing around with this project, the restrictions helped me come up with ideas I might not otherwise have done however I did find once I had those ideas they were difficult to implement because of the same restrictions. One annoying thing was that I couldn't get the audio in sync, the video would lag behind it. In the final version it still does this a bit, I had to drag the audio over and unfortunately this means the end was truncated. It's slightly off on my Youtube which you don't notice except with the Pizzicato strings, which makes me sad as that was one of the more impressive effects, it only looks "in time" if you focus on it.
