So I’m finished with animating four songs/sequences of the film now. These are just some rough notes- but first watch the temp version of “Frog fight” from the film.
Since of course all the temp versions of the 30 songs are done and I’ve storyboarded the whole film and built out all the sets I’m in production- this is how it goes…
For audio production/music I’m using Reason 12
For motion capture I’m using a Perception Neuron 3 + gloves + suit that is way too tight.
My workflow is this when I start a new song/sequence.
Orchestrate the song- I edit the music/add new stuff/take things away/add the instruments + do a rough mix + maybe replace my temp voices with AI voices from Audimee like I did in the above “Frog fight” video
Make a list of the animations I need to capture.
Put on the suit and capture all the animations I need for the sequence. I do the animations not synced to music first then I do 4-6 passes of the full song where I dance/pantomime/whatever for the whole thing.
I edit the exported mocap animations to fix things like Unity not seeing the toe bones and fucking up the T-Pose. I wrote a script to fix this stuff so it takes like 3 clicks to fix it for each animation. I also play back/through the animations and tag the best ones.
I animate the sequence in Unity using my mocap files and dump then to Prores videos from Unity recorder.
I edit the sequence using Davinci Resolve.
GO back to step 1 for a new sequence.
Right now this process for each song/sequence- they are all 2.5 - 4 minutes in length btw- this process takes 2-3 days for each one.
There’s 30 songs- so lets say thats 90 days to do all of them- factor in shit fucking up + trips(Going to Japan for a month in November) + house guests and holidays…. I’d say the whole thing should be done in about 5-7 months from now God willing☝️
But yeah its a trip doing this- because I made the music- I’m doing the singing- I’m performing the animations/dancing/etc- I’m doing some programming for it- its like complete artistic expression. It’s a lot of fun as well and good exercising flailing around like a fool in the mocap suit for an hour in the garage 🤣.
Anyhow I worked too much today I need to chill now.
Glad it's coming along. =)