Animated loop to music by Beardyman for a brief.
May 2021
This was a brief I did during my time on Created Academy’s Motion Design Professional course.
55 second looping portion of the video.
The Brief
The brief was to create a looping animation to accompany a specific song by the artist Beardyman, known for his beatboxing, live-looping, and mixing of audio-reactive visual effects into his performances.
As well as creating loops, the brief was an exploration of audio-reactive effects in animations, and the processes involved in managing such effects in live performance settings.
My ideation process for this project is fully detailed in my design document. The link below will open a page where the design document can be viewed in full:
Loop
I based the length of my animation’s loop off of the bars in the track, so that it would loop precisely in time with the music.
The way I built the looping animation for Beardyman’s set means that either:
The full video can be played over the set.
The individual loops can be triggered to start by MIDI controls. The extra 4 bars of animation can be triggered to interject the loop at a point of climax in the performance.
Audio-reactive effects
For the purpose of this project, I wanted to try as much combination of audio reactive effects in 2D and 3D (After Effects and Cinema 4D) as possible.
Though much of the animation was done in 3D, I composited several 2D animations and dedicated a segment of the loop to be in 2D. As such, I had a variety of effects animated with sound effectors in Cinema 4D, and audio to keyframe conversion in After Effects. Some of these include:
The speaker pulsating.
Stars and backgrounds twinkling.
Asteroid belt’s rotational speed and vibrations.
Texturing
I wanted a visual juxtaposition between the falling astronaut and the planet’s body, to mark the opposite stages of the character’s transformation from human to otherworldly being.
Using soft light on the ‘before’ character and hard light on the ‘after’ helped make this distinction.
I also removed the textures from the ‘after’ character, making it solid white to look more ethereal. I think this partly worked to the intended effect - but ultimately it’s an untextured model and inherently comes across just looking somewhat unfinished.