For last year's annual Singing Christmas Tree presentations, we decided to have some fun with an outlandish music video. I've done such comic relief productions in past years, and took a humorous behind-the-scenes look at our presentations last year that included and handful of quick-and-dirty digital effects. This time the drama called for a dream sequence, and is there a better opportunity to play around in front of a green-screen than a dream sequence?
First a little setup, else the video make even less sense than it finally did: The live drama involved a family preparing for Christmas, and visiting Uncle Bert picked up a rather eccentric admirer in the form of the family's peculiar next door neighbor Nina. We set out to drive home just how Bert felt about Nina in this dream sequence:
"Wooden Soldiers on Parade" Music Video
As you can see, the goal was not to achieve realism (I don't feature this on the demo reel I send to Industrial Light and Magic), but clarity and humor--hopefully achieving both at least most of the time. I had to crank it out pretty quick, and looking back at it I see a few rough areas (I'm not really sure it's clear that it is a can of Play Doh he steps in and angers), but it went over very well and hopefully conveys the sort of effects one can achieve with blue and green screen composites.
I started off with an animatic. By editing the rough drawings of the action, I was able to work out timing and even plausibility of production. It was much better to see where to retime things and what gags to cut while working with sketches rather than final video. If you are planning a dramatic or music video that involves fickle timing and composition as well as effects, it will serve you well to sketch it all out, scan the drawings, and edit them into a simple video.
I'll get into more about the final effects work in future posts, and perhaps we can see how they can be applied to projects the average video departments might actually make.
