Music Video Production: Part 1

The past 3 weeks have been completely consumed with my current school project:  a music video.  We are a team of three students and we have a total of 5 weeks to go from concept to final product.

We were assigned to a local artist named Alexis Harte.  The song is called "President" and it's a humorous jab at President Bush.  I'll have to admit, if we had not been assigned to Alexis, I might never have heard any of his music.  It's mostly acoustic and would probably be classified as folk rock.  Despite this, the song has really grown on me and I find myself humming the melody and reciting lyrics randomly.

For my own sanity (and possibly to the interest of a few people), I've decided to blog about the ongoing production process.

First, we met with Alexis and listened to the song and read the lyrics.  We had a huge brainstorming session where we wrote down every idea we could come up with, no matter how odd or impossible.  From there, we narrowed it down to the three that seemed to be the most compelling and drew up storyboard sketches for how each idea might play out.

Here are some excerpts from an idea that we didn't end up using.  It's a story about what might happen to George Bush after he's no longer president.  He goes to live in a retirement home with Kim Jong Il, Castro, and Bin Laden where they reminisce over the old days and do things like play cards, golf, go on fishing trips, etc.

Ultimately, this was not the direction we went and we decided to go with a different idea.  We wanted to attempt to mix live action with motion graphics in a pop-up book.

Here are the storyboard sketches  for that idea:

After we developed our idea further and came up with a solid storyline, we started creating the assets for the motion graphics, shot our live action on green screen and had to build a semi-operational pop-up book with movable tabs, wheels, etc.

Here's an inked illustration of one of the characters from a frame in the above storyboard:

And here's the same illustration after it's been scanned and processed in Illustrator:

I'm in doing most of the illustration for the project which means i've been drawing like crazy!  I don't consider drawing nor illustration to be one of my strong points, but this project has given me the opportunity to really try and push and develop that side of my skill set.  It's been frustrating at times, but lots of fun.  The good thing is that the pop-up book is supposed to look kind of cartoony, like a children's book.

For the inking, i'm using some japanese brush pens.  I love them!  With one stroke, you can get a variety of line weight in a very fluid manner.  Not too forgiving if  you mess up, but it keeps you focussed on the work.

Though the above image doesn't show it, we'll be coloring everything with watercolor to give the book a nice organic, handmade feel (though all graphics will be animated digitally).  This means we've also been painting all sorts of colors, scanning those in, and then replacing the colors in Illustrator using clipping masks.

On the live action side, we've shot everything on green screen and will composite the footage with our motion graphics.

Here are a few still images from our shoot with the band:

We're shooting everything on HD (720 and 1080) so that we can effectively key out the green for compositing.  This means huge video files transferred via 8 GB P2 cards to Final Cut Pro.  The upside to this is that you don't have to log and capture the footage in real time, you simply download the digital file from card to computer.

I'll try to continue this blog as best I can as the production develops.  This has been a hell of a lot of work, but I'm learning a lot!

It would be almost impossible for our small 3-person team to complete this on our own.  Huge thanks go out to our classmates and instructors for their assistance!