Psalm 1

This was a video that i made for g-dcast after they ran a song writing competition. I got this piece by Elijah Aaron, It is really beautiful and even after 1000's of listens while making the video, it is still lovely. anyway i got this piece. I wanted to try to create something a little abstract but still with a narrative based on the lyrics. The song had a nice pace to it and the idea of a little cube running and going on a journey came up. i took ideas from "Between bears" by Eran Hilleli and i also saw the cube as the fridge from "A grand day out" but not so expressive. I made the storyboard, animatic etc in a week and Jeremy added ideas and themes. The animation started with Photoshop 3D. I wanted the cube to be a real little object that had come to life.i used photoshop 3d to create the cube movement for each scene. I took this PNG sequence of images into flash and added the squiggly legs- i really like the squiggly legs they gave it a fragility and vibrance i think; certainly better than all the symbol type legs i tried. Flash also does a bit of 3d but it didnt look as good as photoshop.I bumped up the publish settings to get good png quality (remember this) I took these swfs and put them into AE. From there i built a little world based on a few basic principals, lots of texture and triangles. The bendy movements on the trees: i added puppet pins; starched the tree trunk and then using motion sketch and pressing cmd and drag pins around in real time to get smooth movement. The leaves were made in flash- i just spun and flipped a triangle randomly then made a motion sketch path for it. Each leaf has its own motion sketch path draw- all the leaves that form the balloon and cube etc.. the balloon was made by tracing a easter egg shape. drawing triangles on it and then putting them on seperate layers. these layers could then be turned on in whatever order in AE. i like the cube climbing and plodding up the hill. The long shots with little things in the back are cute. The river i made by using Mr Mercury- you can corral mr mercury but you cant really control him too much. i like this river though. the type face is really cute, its called matilde... The story can be seen in lots of ways - but i subconsciously did a very strange thing with the imagery. The journey the cube makes is based on a real hour long walk around kreuzberg and friedrichshain. All of the main symbols in the video represent buildings or areas on this berlin journey. Points if anyone can figure this out. I worked near ostbahnhof so figure out what the cube on the mountain represents first and work backwards...