After seeing a replacer script by Jazzdalek on BlenderArtists forum, i knew that I wanted to try it out: animating using cut-out replacement animation. And i was one of those Blender Heads that used Blender just to play around, i’ve never done a huge project in Blender, well, this was the project for all that.

See the “behind the scenes” featurette on youtube—>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij1lCYWx5Lc

or

Sy Smith emailed me photo’s of herself, in various poses and expressions. I used photoshop to match the RGB values in all the photos. A photo of her saying “Ahh” naturally had different lighting to one in which she said e.g. “Ohh”, so i had to get all the photos of the facial expressions to match in terms of light and value, just so when i used replacement animation her face wouldn’t appear to be under an ever changing light source.

In Blender, i used planes and textured them using the photos, and created a basic rig. i applied Jazzdalek’s replacer script on the head and hands. Then the fun of animating began.

From the get go i had a list of things i wanted to avoid:

1. Motion Graphics.

Motion graphics are all over the place.

This was a hard thing to avoid using since i knew it would look “good” and “en vogue”. I end up using motion graphics for the grafitti on the wall

2. Fast and Busy editing.

The song is fast and has a staccatto beat, tempting to do fast and busy editing. I wanted to try something that was new for me. Since the animation appears to be stopmotion like, the face animation plays in staccato, matching the staccato flow of the song. Fast editing was unnecessary.

3. Softimage XSI

Jesus, this was hard, i know XSI well, i’ve animated using XSI for a couple of years, imagine when i was animating with Blender thinking how certain things are easier to do in XSI. To get the vinyl to rotate nicely in Blender was hard, very easy in XSI to do. But i stuck it out and used blender, i used Pydrivers to rotate the vinyl records along a path. The horror of horrors happened when i realised that it was tricky when i had two vinyl records in one scene. Rotations got weird so i ended up rendering the two vinyl records separately. Though I’ve got a feeling that Blender 2.5 is gonna kick ass.

After all the animation was done, i composited the video in Blender and hit render. I wish Blender’s “file output” node could output to Quicktime, it doesn’t

Thank God for a website like openfootage.net, i got my timelapse clouds there and used them for sky replacements. I also got a nice paronama shot from there.

Hopefully the next project will be completely done with open source. I can’t wait to use The Gimp and Cinelerra. First I gotta install Ubuntu Linux. Yummy!