Besides Marc Anthony for Premios Juventud 2013, I did a song for Jencarlos Canela called “I Love It.” Our performance was tied to the music video which featured some paint effects. My general direction was just to feature bright, neon paint as many ways I could.
Paint is hard to simulate since it is a liquid that moves very organically. It’s also presents problems with loops, since once paint splatters, sprays, or drips it can’t really backup and drip back to the way it started. So I had to come up with some creative ways to make my content loops so it can be played constantly without jumping. Some of them were just stock clips that I had to hit with a few effects in After Effects. Usually it was just a Luma Key to put the paint off a black background and a effect like Hue/Saturation to colorize it a certain way.
But for the opening part of the song producers wanted the screens to have dripping paint and I couldn’t find any good stock for that. So I shot it myself, it looked like this:
It was far from an ideal setup, just me slinging black paint on a poster board in a dimly lit warehouse for a couple hours. But I pulled a matte with the contrast between the paint and the board, then cleaned up the matte with a few tools and added a little but of glow, turbulence for the curve of the drips, and obviously some color to the plain black drips. It was a lot of work for something that was only going to be on the screens for 30 seconds.
The loop I liked the most came during the instrumental bridge of the song. As is a theme with my performance content, I try to keep things simple but have them stand out. I was running out of paint video so I decided to make some movement…without any actual movement. My favorite textures site is CGTextures, I use them all the time and they have saved my butt many times. And they certainly came in handy here:
I grabbed a bunch of high resolution stills of paint splats, then I lined them up on my After Effects timeline and cropped them after 10 frames, then went to the top menu to Animation -> Keyframe Assistant -> Sequence Layers which lined up my layers one after another. Then I set an Adjustment Layer above the paint splats with Hue/Saturation to shift the color every 10 frames as well, using the Wiggler. If you set these keyframes to be hold keyframes, the color will randomly jump every 10 frames without any easing between keyframes. The result is a cycling animation of paint splats jumping at a pace, and it really fit with the rhythm of the song. I shifted the colors and sequence of the splats to get different patterns going across all the screens. This is an example of what kind of motion you can create…without any actual motion.
The goal of these shows is to create memorable acts that look unique and different from each other. It seems like I did the job if you compare my Marc Anthony content with my Jencarlos Canela content.
