The First Edit of the New Music Video

I have finally gotten done with all the animation for the music video that I have been putting together. It uses an original song of mine named "Lady Dark Eyes". The mood is a dark party in the middle of a storm. The main characters are a witch and the house owner. My avatar/character makes a cameo appearance as one of the people at the party. This took a little over three months to build 3D models, set up scenes, do the animation and then edit the video. I was hoping to get it done before Halloween, but, missed the date. It is still a rough edit, but, I am going to wait until next year to clean it up.

It was an interesting project despite the frustration with how look it took to animate the scenes (see many previous blog posts complaining about this). I learned a lot as this was my first major animation project in Poser. I learned how to get effects for lightning. Did a fire effect in a fireplace. Tried many settings for lighting using many dramatic lighting effects including one in a ruined house with a witch casting spells that is my favorite. Did some facial animation. Tried my hand at silhouettes like the old iPod commercials. Overused the dolly camera (I almost get motion sickness watching the video). And lastly did a lot of animation work. All in all it was a tremendous learning experience and I am glad I am done.

The story is about a witch who comes to a party, get's friendly with a guy and then disappears leaving him standing on the balcony already missing her. There are 10 avatar/characters in the main party scene and seven witches in the opening graveyard scene. Though it was fun, I will probably wait a little until I jump into my next animation video as it is so time consuming.

I am going to try my hand at mixing my 3D modeling with my interest in digital painting that I have played with over the last couple of years. I do however plan on doing a video based on the song Backyard Beatles. I got some photos from my cousin Greg of old black and white shots with the high school rock band I was in, so, I will probably make a video that mixes photos and images with animation. I probably will begin this sometime next spring.