Animation: Take One!

You might recall me mentioning in my last post that I have started animating the trailer for my book, Soulbound, and I hope (sincerely) that it's done by Feb 10th so that it's ready for the ARC blog tour. Of course, trying to animate a minute-forty-second trailer in less than a month....weeeeell, since I have no prior animation experience, I'm finding it to be a delightful challenge.

As promised, this blog is the first of many detailing my adventure in teaching myself animation and going through the trials and tribulations of creating a smoothly animated trailer. First lesson:

MUSIC

The first time I tried making an animation some three years ago, I got the key frames done and was making some massive progress, but I stopped when my computer crashed. A few months later, I began again, but there seemed to be less organization and less fire, and the project eventually vanished from the back burner altogether. What was missing? I asked myself as I began this newest trailer. What had I missed out on last time, and why couldn't I seem to get things right?

Then a friend of mine, Mallory Rock of Mallory Rock Art, suggested I check out this Website called Audiojungle. And as I skimmed their collections, pulling up a few random songs that piqued my interest, I began to connect a little more with the idea of choosing the music first. Then, I found the song. The moment it started, I could see what I wanted to animate, how I wanted to time it, and how the music would impact the story I wanted to tell through my trailer.

This is it, I realized. This is the song I've been waiting for, and this is what I need to start my journey and finish it. So, I bought the song. Now, some of you know that I am pretty damn poor. Broke, actually, but I decided that if I didn't have this song, the trailer would never come into being. Since I'm putting forth hours a day to make my dream a reality, I figured $19 was worth it--especially since I couldn't afford to hire anyone to animate for me!

"Well, yes," you might say, "of course music had to be involved. But c'mon. That's not what I'm reading this blog for. What else did you discover?"

SPLITTING YOUR TIMELINE

Once I had my music, I imported it into Windows Movie Maker (told you I'm poor) and snipped it down. The original track was 2:15, and that's way too long for a trailer. The song itself is amazing, so I had a hard time pulling out bits of the soundtrack to make it shorter, but I managed to make it smooth enough that no one should notice.

After clipping my music to 1:37 (far more reasonable), I began the task of breaking the track up into three blocks: Animation segments, black segments (for drama), and text segments. To do this, I created slides in CS4 (thank goodness I still have this program from high school days! It has saved my arse so many times!). One says, "ANIMATION" on a white background, another says, "TEXT," and the last one is just a black slide.

My next task was to listen to the music in bits over and over, dropping in my new slides until they were timed right. I hit dramatic pauses, strong notes, bursts, and all sorts of lovely segments until I had a great flow and could listen to the entire song without changing a thing. This took me quite some time to accomplish (about three and a half hours), so if this is your first time ever making a trailer, don't expect it to go super fast!

"That's pretty boring," you might say. "When does the action begin? I thought you were animating this thing!"

Well, I am. But we're not there yet. Almost--I promise, but there's one more thing yet to do before we start animating!

TEXT SLIDES

Ah, the text slides. The fade-in, fade-out glory of shadowed-and-highlighted movie text on a black background. Text is quite important, because it's what draws the viewer along. Sure, you can have fantastic animation and breathtaking music, but none of that matters if your viewers and potential readers can't tell who is who, what's at stake for each character, and why they should bother buying your book.

I spent a goodly amount of time working through what I wanted to say, where to say it (more adjusting timing, fades, and working with those slides I used earlier to chunk out what goes when), and tweaking the text itself over and over until it was smooth and made sense. My boyfriend helped me here a few times, which was great. NEVER underestimate the helpfulness of someone nearby, because if they haven't read your work, they'll let you know when something needs changing.