Kickstarter animation

I recently did some animation work for a new project on Kickstarter. It was an interesting challenge to integrate animation with live footage. The main speaker was filmed on a green screen and then I added an animated background and characters to interact with her. The character animation was exported as transparent PNG images and placed in front of and behind the speaker. Art was done with Xara Designer Pro and animation with Harmony. Compositing was done in Sony Vegas. Oh yeah, the sparkles behind the stars were done using Harmony’s particle effects.

http://kck.st/y7pDBP

Hi Zeb

Looks very good. Always a challenge integrating live action and animation but you seem to have the whole thing nicely balanced.

Bob

Thanks, Bob! I try! ::slight_smile:

Your animations were looking good.

I was totally stunned at what the kickstarter was asking money for. It wasn’t what i expected at all.

It will be interesting to see. I have noticed that things that get funded there don’t seem to have any pattern.

Yeah, James, it’s amazing! Some things don’t get anything while others reach their goal and go over. It’s a mystery to me.

I have contemplated doing one for myself someday. I figure if I can get enough with an appeal I can stop freelancing and concentrate on my own projects. At the same time, those projects have to be profitable in themselves and ongoing. The shame would be to drop out of freelancing and cultivating new clients so I can follow my own dream and at the end of that time not come up with anything marketable. Then I’d have to try and drum up my old clients and get new ones.

For now, I’m just happy to have work, income and be busy!

Lilly nailed it. I’m a big believer in funding these projects (on indie-go-go, too) so I’ve watched quite a few go through the whole process. The ones that have met (and surpassed) their goals ALL took advantage of social networks. In fact, they worked them to exhaustion. :slight_smile:

Ah. Back to the animation. You did such a good job of connecting your live action to the animation! Yay. I dedicated ten videos to learning/teaching myself what it takes to synch up green screen and animations. (I thought it’d be way easier. I was totally wrong. :/) It definitely helps to have a green screen that’s not wrinkled. ha.

Very cool, Zeb. Yeah, I’ve thought of doing a Kickstarter campaign (Actually IndieGoGo) to fund an animation project. But as others mentioned, it’s REALLY hard to get discovered among the 1,000,000s of crowdfunded projects if you don’t already have a huge fanbase. We’ll see. :slight_smile:

What a talented girl!

This kickstarter thing can really work, actually, I had a friend who raised the money to record her first album through Kickstarter. But I think that most of the people who pledged for her either knew her, or knew someone who knew her, and it’s really about spreading the word more than anything else.

I hope she makes it!

~Lilly