It's been a while since I last mentioned the "O Coldplay" Bird project on this blog, but I decided to get back at it recently because I am entering this project into eMagine in the 2D Animation category. I also renamed the project to just "Birds" because I thought it wasn't necessary to include the song title and artist with the actual project title. Hopefully, this will become a finalist in eMagine in April!
After taking a long hiatus on Birds, I went back and looked through the project to see what scenes needed to be cleaned up and finished. Most of the scenes include the birds flying in formation at different camera angles, adjusting movements for the starry sky and sunrise, getting birds into a pole line, and moving clouds. There are also some scenes that I want to highlight about what I did, and how they helped me learn more about After Effects.
In this scene, the birds are "hovering above", where the birds can be seen flying at a worm's eye viewpoint. To get all of the birds flying together at once, I learned that it is possible to adjust the positioning keyframes for each layer at once so the birds can fly together without getting lost with their pack.
This scene here, where the lyrics play the part "It's how you think of love", I had the challenge of getting all of my birds from their normal flight formation to fit inside a heart when the word love comes in, and returning back to their normal flight pattern. I accomplished this task by setting the keyframes to the original flight path. After that, I made each bird fly to their spot when the heart showed up the moment the song got to love so the birds can fly to the music.
This scene here goes up from the normal bird scene, the night sky, and a sunrise. Originally, I had each background scene separate and attempted to compile it all together in After Effects with the camera. I had a lot of trouble aligning all of my layers and getting them to move smoothly. I fixed this by making a long "sky strip" in Photoshop that included all of my necessary layers. The sky strip was made to fit three In here, I added in a sunrise gradient and edited the stars to have a soft glow at the bottom. The sky strip really helped me save lots of time and made me realize that if I want to transition between two or more scenes, I should use this method.
In this scene, the birds fly to a wire pole, and then fly away to the lyrics of "Sometimes they arrive, sometimes they are gone". I personally think this was the most interest scene to work with since it involved lots of patience and critical thinking. The first thing I did was precisely time the birds' drawings and keyframes to the music. I also allowed some breathing room for the birds entering in and leaving so all of the birds don't come and go all at once. To make each bird different when coming in and leaving, I adjusted the entrance and exiting keyframes with the for each bird tweaking each bird's graph path and adjusting the timing to when each bird flies to and out of the pole.
In this scene, where the birds fly away back home, I had to look back to the side view and worm's eye view of the bird formations to understand how the birds should be aligned. As I aligned the birds, I had some trouble getting the birds cooperating with the camera zooming out in order to have the birds appear like they're flying away. To fix this, I decided to render out the birds flying into one video. After that, I imported that video into After Effects and moved the camera's Point of Interest and the bird's positioning to get the look that I wanted.
I had lots of fun making this animation and really enjoy the final product. The whole version of Birds is available to watch
here!
