Now we had the videos and the soundtrack decided, I could get to work doing the various jobs that needed to be completed before Will and Toni could continue and help. First of all I needed to sort through, trim and order all of the relevant clips so that they synced up with the music we had chosen.
I rendered this out as one long movie, just so everyone could get a feel for the pace and also as twelve individual scenes/clips (each with their respective segment of the song).
Then I had to set these up within Cinema 4D and make sure a number of things were correct. For all twelve scenes, their frame numbers/clip length in C4D needed to exactly match each clip it was associated with. To time this I imported each clip as a jpeg sequence and turned on the animation texture function. I could then see where the last jpeg frame was and cut my C4D scene down to exactly that last frame.
So the 3D would fit within the clip, I needed to do some stuff with the lighting and compositing tags. In order to match the brightness of the world the 3D should inhabit, I used a copy of the clip and made that be one of the luminous textures in my scene. I could also add some area and directional lights to match certain prominent lights within the scene.
Finally, but very importantly, I needed to recreate certain elements of the clip within my C4D scene and make them 3D elements on the canvas. This would then allow me to cover these 3D elements in a texture of the original clip (so you can’t see them) but means the other 3D objects we are animating have something to interact with and will look like they’re actually inhabiting the world properly. Due to the limited time I had before needing to get them sent across, the mapping of the scenes wasn’t entirely accurate as I know a quick way of masking out the obvious faults on the renders in After Affects during post production.
I did this for all twelve scenes so they could be passed back to Will and Toni and the animating could begin.