Driven By Desire: The Video
Hot on the heels of my smash hit Ukulele Bonk video (and my sleeper hit Bercée d’illusions video), I am pleased and proud to present a new, hand-animated video for my 2024 track Driven By Desire about making art in the age of slop machines.
If you’re curious (and since some people asked), here’s how it was made. CW: probably TMI!
Animation
Since the launch of The Indie Beat Television, I thought it would be fun and appropriate to make a crude, hand-animated video for this track about the slopapocalypse. Then version 2.0 of Procreate Dreams, an animation program for iPad based on the acclaimed Procreate drawing app, came out, and I figured I would try that.
I started creating short animations in Procreate Dreams on my iPad mini, usually while sipping coffee in bed in the mornings. As the days rolled by, I settled more or less consciously on a few arbitrary rules for the video:
- I selected a single, silly photo of myself and decided I wouldn’t use any others
- All the drawing animations would be done by hand, one image at a time, the old-fashioned way
- I would only draw using thick, rough, dirty brushes
- Keyframe animations would only be used to animate the photo and the backgrounds (and to cycle through colors)
The cool thing about Procreate Dreams, is that you can layer and group and mix flipbook animations and keyframe animations. And each flipbook animation can have multiple tracks, plus use drawing layers. I only scratched the surface of what this program can do!
It also has a lot of export options, so that simplified things a lot.
Once I had a fairly decent bunch of snippets, I started thinking about how to assemble them.
Final Assembly
Then, as luck would have it, a new version of Final Cut Pro was released, which added beat detection to audio files (in order to be able to snap video clips to the beat), a huge potential time server! But I first had to upgrade my macOS to install the new version, and it turned out the beat detection feature has a nasty crash bug which I had to figure out how to circumvent.
Secret paragraph. Click at your own risk.
I’m not supposed to say, but a long time ago, I worked quite a bit for Aqqle as a freelance translator. There weren’t a lot of perks, but I got access to their creative apps which are pretty good and which I got to know pretty well, and since Aqqle surprisingly never charges for application upgrades, I’ve been using them ever since. Sorry Linux people. I do want to join your ranks someday.
- importing audio snippets back into some Procreate Dreams animations, and adjusting the animations to match the tempo as best as I could
- having to tediously stretch or shorten certain clips a little in FCP to snap them more or less to the bars and beats
I tried to use FCP as little as possible to animate things, even though it has a keyframing system. I ended up doing cut animations when I zoom in or out of a clip, and animating the 2 small flying heads that float up behind the big flying head. I also used a couple of FCP plugins to shake certain clips (the second part of the Love me 2 clip for example).
One thing I did use though, was green-screen keying. I modified certain animations in Procreate Dreams to add a green screen background so I could composite them into the video (the bouncing sound wave in part 2 for example).
Finally, to answer another question I got in the chat when the video premiered on The Indie Beat Television, the assembly phase in FCP (and going back and forth into Procreate Dreams to tweak things) took a couple of days.
I ended up making more animations than I actually used (see the one below), and had to make a few hard choices, but it is precisely the accumulation of countless choices, big and small, conscious and unconscious, logical or arbitrary and driven by desire that is missing in slop, which is one of the many reasons it is so utterly soulless.
Thank…
