Guinness, Brilliant Animations, simple version

bigteethproductions

bigteethproductions

Well-known member
I'm working on a project that is kind of parodying the Guinness Brewmasters "Brillliant" animations.

All I really want to do is have the characters move into the center of the screen (probably with a static background) and talk to each other, maybe with some arm/leg movements. I'll also dub in the voices.

I am experimenting a little bit doing it only in FCP (after creating the images in photoshop). I have Motion but don't really know how to use it yet.

Anyone else done this? I think it simply involves lassoing the mouth of the character and layering the image in FCP and then moving it up and down with keyframes. Would that work or do I have to do something else?

This can be pretty raw as far as lip movement synching with dialogue.
 
Brilliant!

Sorry, had I seen your previous thread I would have helped you out. I believe the original Guiness ads were done with After Effects, but as you found out, you can easily replicate this effect using a lot of keyframes on the mouths and such.

Very cute idea. One comment I would have to make though is during the picture section, you simply do a zoom in to every picture (or out) and then flip to the next picture. This can get very boring and repetitive to the viewer. FCP is not the best tool to make slideshows with in this manner. I suggest taking a look at Still Life (http://www.grantedsw.com/still-life/) or another competitor of this (there are a few newer ones) to spice up your movements a little bit. It's much faster to do this way and it looks a ton better. I'm updating my website right now but I'll post an example in the future.

Overall, nice job!

Ted
 
hey ted,

i know you responded a while back but i was just going through the old threads and wondering, after checking out the link to still life, how different it is from just doing it all in Final Cut? It seems like from some of the samples I saw using still life it wasn't much different.

Maybe some of the pans and zooms felt smoother, but can't you achieve those movements in FCP with keyframing and smoothing out the points?

I'd just like to know what the real advantage would be to using a different program b/c FCP integrates so easily with the rest of the Final Cut Studio (obviously).

thanks,
Gregg
 
I really liked the opening scene. And: Motion IS a lot easier to work with for these kind of things, but the workflow is different, so the disadvantage may outweigh your advantages... that is... if your project is no more than 30 sec.

Yours is.

But then again, you've spent a lot of time fcp'ing it so it won't be the right time to recreate in motion.

Also stills are handled far better in Motion than FCP.

But: Nice work (especially on the slightly Monthy Pythonish opening sequence)

Gunleik
 
Very fast to do in FCP with simple keyframing, I've done this. Or use Motion, the experience will teach you a lot about using Motion and make Motion more accessable to you in the future. AE is, well, this is just so simple, I'd keep it in FCP and/or Motion.
 
Big Teeth- I was just talking about the picture section for Still Life (not the Guiness take off section as other people have been commenting about).

You can download a demo of Still Life to try it out and see why it is easy to make a photo montage. You can do all of this stuff in FCP via keyframes, but it takes much longer, even if you are very experienced at keyframes in FCP like myself. There are other programs that do this stuff as well, I am just familiar with Still Life the best.

The difference between using this program instead of FCP (aside from the speed and ease of making montages) is that you can do movements on a curve, instead of straight a to b keyframes. Makes everything look so much more fluid. Download the free demo and try it out.

Ted
 
You'd be amazed at how fast I can keyframe in FCP. And I can do curves, too! And ease in and out, too! EXTREAMLY fast. And being able to save Motion Favorites, I only have to do a movement once, save it, and I can drop it onto any photo in any project at any time. I have a pretty nice library of motion favorites.

Thus, I'm not locked into presets, can keyframe as fast as Still Life can apply presets, it's really not a huge deal. The two keys are creating a Keyframe Window Layout, and building a nice collection of Motion Favorites.

But Still Life is fine if you want to go the preset motion route.

I'll still argue, having used Still Life, that I can keyframe (and with curves) as fast as Still Life can apply a preset. But then, I've been doing this for a very, very long time.
 
I like working in FCP too as far as the photo montage goes. I don't mind the keyframing and feel like I can have more control over it (maybe i'm just not doing it yet).

As far as the animation goes, I wouldn't mind learning After Effects in the future, but everyday its another decision of which program to try and master so again with this I'll stick with FCP b/c the animation is so rough I think its fine.

Question for BenB - when you talk about a "Keyframe Window Layout" what is the process behind that? Maybe its something I already know but not the terminology, or if its new, I'd love to learn it. I end up doing a lot of copy/paste attributes of basic motion, but its never totally accurate from one photo to the next.

thanks all
 
If you've got Final Cut Studio, spending time learning Motion is very valuable.

I made a custom window layout, and I call it "Keyframe Window Layout". You can make and save custom window layouts, button bars, Browser column layouts, keyboard shortcuts. All very useful things to know. Here's a couple of screen shots of my Keyframe Window Layout. This should explain the whole idea. Point is to create a custom window layout (and you can carry these files to any FCP machine you may have to work on, each is just a tiny little file) that allows you enough room to do serious keyframing in the Motion tab. Bascially, you move windows around, size them the way you want, then save it as a custom window layout. You'll even get keyboard shortcuts for them automatically.

fcpwindow1.jpg


fcpwindow2.jpg
 
Right on. I see what you mean as far as creating the window layout - I do that sometimes (though now will create and save one as that will make it even faster). I thought you were talking about creating a specific movement that you import from motion or something - which didn't make sense to me if that was the case.

Ben - since you've been so helpful already, any suggestions on repeating movements from photo to photo - as i mentioned earlier, when I copy/paste attributes a lot of times they don't sync from one pic to another (even if they're the same length). Then I have to go to each pic and move the keyframes to fit it, which is VERY tedious especially with lots of pics. Is this just the way it is with FCP or is there another way that will yield more accurate results?
 
When you Paste Attributes, be sure the option to scale it to the new clip is checked. But, when I have movements I use a lot, like when I used to do weddings (which I do NOT miss) and did photomontages out the wazoo, I made a Motion Favorite.

Apply your keyframes, with that clip loaded up in the Veiwer, go to the Effects menu. Towards the bottom of the menu, select "Make Motion Favorite". Poof, it's in your Favorites bin in the Effects tab of the Browser. Drag and drop onto any clip you want. Give it a meaningful name, thought! I even made a new Bin inside the Favorites Bin and called it Motion Favs, and place all my MFs in there.

Same can be done for filters. Say you stack up the right filters with the right settings and get the prefect effect. Say you need to repeat this for several shots in the project, or say maybe it's awesome, was a lot of work, and you just want to save it to use sometime in the future without having to rebuild it from scratch. Effects > Make Favorite Effect. Problem with that is it puts the filters (actually, copies) in a little folder, you title the folder, you drag and drop the little folder onto any clip you want. But don't open the folder, it'll default to listing the filtes in Alphabetical order and mess up your effect. Wish Apple would change that.

Now, motion favorites will keep the keyframes at the same durations. They won't dynamically change or anything like that.

When you paste, I bet you're not taking into account transitions, when you say they don't sync. Only reason I can think of.

Also, when working with keyframes, if you want to move a set that's in place, but not the right place, for a specific parameter, you can use the Slide tool with keyframes. FYI...
 
excellent! Thanks again. I have several projects I'm working on that I'll try and do that with.

As far as the transitions, I had thought of that, and I assume that is the case as well. So should I apply the motion effect to all of the clips first, then add transitions? I feel like i've tried doing it that way and after the transition has been applied to no avail, but maybe I just imagined i did :)
 
Apply transitions FIRST! I'm about to release a video tutorial that covers this type of work. Imagine your timeline, two clips butt up against each other in a specific place. Add a 2 second long transition, and the first clip is now 1 second longer, the second clip begins 1 second sooner.

The transition is 2 seconds long, so from the original edit point, it has to overlap one second in each direction.

So, when you set your motion, you'd place your playhead at the begining of the transition for your first keyframes for the second clip. It has to move all through that transition, right?

Then you'd place the last keyframe for your first clip at the end of the transition, as i has to keep moving until it's totally and safely out of sight, right?

This is where Wireframe + Image comes in handy. You can set your play head, highlight the clip you're working on, it will get the big X over it in the Canvas, grab that puppy with your mouse and move it, size it, etc. You're working on two overlapping clips, so being careful about which clip is highlighted in the timeline is imortant, as the highlighted clip in the timeline gets the big wireframe X on it in the Canvas, no matter where your playhead is. You park your playhead to place keyframes at that point in the timeline.

Ok, hope this helps, but do put transitions in first. Otherwise you're first clip will stop moving halfway into the transition, and your second clip will be frozen until you get half way through the transition.
 
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