Compositing and Music

A while back, I came across this song and loved it immediately. The odd array of instruments create an unusual but wonderful sound. I like the gradual increase of more instruments being used, where it starts of with a simple but up-beat piece giving it quite a playful aspect and then the string instruments add a sense of mystery and dream-like feel. I think it's a flawless match and I knew I wanted to use it before we even begun the 3D work. I feel it resembles what we were trying to achieve of an imaginary, playful and abstract city. We ignored the rules of physics and let the plane fly freely and using any pieces of paper textures with patterns and doodles and used packaging reminds me of a child going wild playing with old scraps.

The final job I had was to composite all the rendered scenes out into one movie file. I tried to time each shot as close to the music as I could, however some scenes were very difficult to do so as I needed to extended the shot duration. But I discovered that it was difficult to do this without affecting the rest of the shot's animation aswel, so the only solution was to go back into Maya and change it from there. However, if the shot needed to be shortened down then it was very simple to do this. So a lesson learned; it's better to render out scenes for longer than needed incase of compositing issues.

A useful and very effective tool I found was the opacity transform tool, which I used to fade out a scene into another scene. This worked well when the previous shot directly relates to the next. An improvement I would make whilst looking back at this stage is to perfect the music and timing of the shots. So the scenes would transition exactly when the tempo or note changes. Unfortunately to do that now would require either re-animating or re-timing the scenes in Maya again, which would be extremely time consuming and unwise at this stage.