A Night In Shangri La
It's been a while I know. I was asked by Michael Laine Hildebrandt of Bubble Gum Orchestra to create a video for his song 'A Night In Shangri La'. So, my short film has been postponed for a while as there's no way I was going to turn this project down. I'm never likely to get the chance to create a video for an ELO song so this was certainly the next best thing!
We came up with a 'story' between us and I created a rough animatic in SpringBoard. I like Springboard because you can very quickly sketch out your panels and add camera moves and time the whole thing out. This time I decided to export all my images and import them into HitFilm. As there is not a complicated soundtrack but just one track consisting of the song it seemed sensible to compile the animatic in HitFilm and create the entire film within the software.
Below you can see the animatic being compiled to the soundtrack.
Next I created certain elements in Anime Studio such as this SteamPunk style tape deck and violin.
There are a couple of Busby Berkley style dance shots with violins. I started by animating one violin's bow, power meter and cogs. This was added to a Group Folder. I could then animate this violin doing the dance moves using the Transform and Rotate Tools on this Group Folder Layer. This was then added to another Group Folder and copied several times to create 8 violins all doing the same dance move.
I could then, using a guide as a background layer, use the Transform and Rotate Layer Tools to position each Group Layer around the circles of the guide. Another Group Folder was then created containing all the previous layers and called Inner Circle.
Once I had that I copied the Folder twice and named them Middle Circle and Outer Circle. these could then just be scaled up and placed on the circles of the background guide.
This was saved out of Anime Studio in HD TV format using the Logarith codec and with an Alpha channel. i could then load this into HitFilm on a video track above the coresponding shot on the animatic track.
I could then add various effects to the video in HitFilm.
Here I've converted the Tape Deck shot to a 3D layer which enables lighting effects to be added to it. You can see that a spot light has been added in front to give more dramatic lighting. A light flare has been added behind also.
There's quite a way to go yet but it's coming along. Next time I will post a few sneak peaks at the video.
Bye for now.
All images are (c) Michael Laine Hildebrandt 2012
