One of my favorite past times on my gap year is seeing if I can spot street cats while walking to and from my apartment. On particularly special days, I spot these stray cats basking in the sun on the flat roof across the street from my room. And what else would I do on these momentous occasions other than write a song for them?
I recorded and produced the song in Logic, then, I got started on the video. I knew I wanted to hand draw the text on a video of one of the roof cats, so I actually sketched some ideas for how the text could be placed on the screen.
With the song being so happy and fun, especially with the bubble percussion and ukulele, I knew that the animations also had to be full of movement and joyously bouncy as well. I planned to convey this through creative transitions, such as the little wiggling line of movement halfway down the image below, and thick lettering.
Here is the first draft of the video that I drew in Adobe Photoshop using the video timeline feature. I tried to utilize the structure of the buildings and trees in the video as best I could as well, to really show the interaction and interconnections between the song, the environment, the animations, and the cat.
Here are some behind the scenes secrets and lessons I learned:
- At first I was drawing every single frame by hand. This was incredibly tiring, so on my second day of animating I switched to drawing only a couple frames for each lyric, then repeating those frames in Premiere Pro when putting everything together. This also gave me the freedom to take more time with drawing each frame and utilizing onion skins to make sure there wasn't as much chatter, which was especially important for lyric legibility.
- I did not actually record enough video for the entire song! And by the time I realized, the cat had already gone :( However, that's when a creative credits page comes in! By fading out early and including cute little cat animations, no one can tell that that's not what I meant to do all along!
Overall, I really enjoyed making this cute little original music video just for fun, and I definitely want to create more in the future.
