Trinity College Performance Official Poster
PENUMBRA - SUMMARY
"Penumbra" is a performing arts show created in collaboration by the students and the professor in a hip hop dance class at Trinity College. I was commissioned to create 8 music visualizers for each scene in the performance. The overall theme for the visuals was "psychedelic". I used a variety of techniques including traditional video editing, 2D animation, 3D animation, and simple motion tracking. Visuals were either created as loops or synced to the songs used in the performance.
I was able to experiment with different styles and techniques while creating the visuals. It was a lot of fun to come up with visualizers based on loose ideas. I also worked with the stage crew to make sure the videos all played at the correct time and were in the correct format.
FINAL VIDEOS
Solo Dancer Visualizer Loop
Scene 1 Character Animation Intro + Loop
Transition Animation for Scene 2
Scene 4 Adhesive Video
Scene 4 Student Individual Pictures Slideshow
Scene 5 Crumbling Dirt Video
Scene 5 Audio Visualizer Clip
Scene 6 Campfire Video Clip
WORKFLOW
SOLO SCENE BREAKDOWN
For the solo performance that happens before the first scene with all the students, I was tasked to create a looping animation to play in the background. I used Blender to create a 3D animation of cubes in a classic music visualizer style. The only constraint was the color palette: blue, purple, and pink.
SCENE 1 BREAKDOWN
Instead of using a traditional 2D animation software, I used Blender's Grease Pencil mode to create a 2.5D animation. The character was animated by hand and synced to the song. My main inspirations for the animation style were Ed, Edd, n Eddy and the "State of the Art" by Gotye music video.
SCENE 2 BREAKDOWN
For Scene 2, one of the students in the class made a painting that the professor wanted to use as a visual. I imported the painting into Photoshop and used the pen tool to separate the individual elements for animation. I also adjusted the levels and saturation to make the painting pop more. Then, I used the CC Kaleida effect in After Effects for each layer to get a cool kaleidoscope effect.
SCENE 4 BREAKDOWN
For Scene 4, the theme was 'adhesive'. I opted to create a video collage using royalty free stock footage from Pexels. The collage was created using After Effects. Videos were layered on top and under each other to create a vague sense of ideas relating to the theme.
SCENE 5 BREAKDOWN
I modeled the speaker in Blender and synced the animation to the song. The background uses simple particles rotating around the speaker.
SCENE 6 BREAKDOWN
The final scene's theme was 'campfire' to compliment the song. Initially, I experimented with creating 3D fire loops in Blender. After talking with the client, I ended up using 2 stock footage videos and slowed down the speed in After Effects.
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