Bird Song mash-up challenge. Here are the elements.

Now you can help us elaborate on “Bird Song: A cartoon requiem for DRM,” our Digital Rights Management animation.

Below you’ll find links to all of the raw audio, video, and image files you need to proceed with your mashup. Let us know if there are any other formats that might be helpful. All of the elements, as well as the video itself is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license with an open
invitation to use, share and modify as you wish, as long as you share your production, don’t use it for commercial purposes and give us (and those before you) a nod of recognition for getting it started.

As for how it was made, we’ll let the designers speak.

Islam Elsedoudi, art direction and design:
We mainly used Adobe After Effects and Adobe Illustrator for the animation and GarageBand for the music.

All the illustrations were drawn in Illustrator using the pen tool for the sleek drawings and the pencil tool for the sketchy drawings. We then brought them into After Effects and built “sets” in a 3D environment with a camera. We put a light source on the background to maintain realism and texture. The solid components of the piece (bird, globe, leaves, chandelier) were treated to look as if they were painted on the background.

The background texture remained consistent and unmoving, while everything else moved as it would in real space. Some of the more crude animations, such as the line rolling into the record and the bird cage falling were conventionally animated, frame by frame, using Illustrator and and a lot of screenshots.

Napoleon Wright, sound design and animation:
Musically, we wanted the song to start out simple and then progress to a more elaborate composition. All the beats and melodies were created using a midi keyboard. As the animation becomes more advanced, so do the instruments. For example, in the scene with the tribe, organic drums and claps are introduced to reflect the evolution of the music.

Now it’s your turn to add to the story. Here are the raw music and video files:

• Bird Song poster [pdf]
• Flying bird animation [mov]
• Vector images (in zipped files) [eps] [svg]
• Music [zip]

This entry was posted by T. Colin Dodd on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 3:56 pm and is filed under culture, multimedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.