Shower Jams: Ghostbusters!

Here it is, the grand finale to our month of Halloween carols.

I've been excited about doing this for weeks, ever since I discovered all this weird stock footage of Russian kids hanging out in arcades.

I have a hard time articulating why this video is a thing. It's not exactly a prank that I'm pulling, by springing an extremely over-produced video on the Shower Sweeties. But it's... it's not not that. Sort of in the way that it’s not showing someone the room you’ve wallpapered with eyes clipped out of magazines. Not exactly.

Production fact: This installment took me 5 or 6 times longer than the average video. There are over 40 VFX shots.

As far as that aspect goes, two versions of the video were edited in Premiere: first, a completely post-able, perfectly good cut of the performance. The Wheat Squares of shower jam videos. Then a second version collaged from found footage shot by all of the fine individuals (or collectives!) named in the credits was laid out on top of it. And then the Dynamic Linking started…

I wish I'd run a screen recording of making this, because it would have been a tidy collection of tricks and techniques for tracking, quick composites, and a bunch of different styles of tv effects. But also, it's very wise that I did not record any evidence of this, because I let myself get away with some abysmal practices in file and after effects project management. Just for fun. Nobody should see that kind of thing.

Finally, and this is also kind of hard for me to explain correctly, I almost don't want to even share this video around. I have, in fact, posted it to more places on the internet than the average week's videos, but like, I know that people don't watch these. Not in the numbers that would justify this kind of thing. And there's something kind of appealing to me about the sacrifice of hours poured into it. Almost in a mystical sense. I’m storing mana for the future in these shots of televisions.

I'd like to unpack whatever that feeling is, but I've got to get started on next week's video.

After Effects Sketches from June 2023

I help strangers on the internet to make things in After Effects. Here are some quick sketches and experiments I’ve made along the way.

Two quick and general purpose tips:

1) There’s no shame in using multiple layers when you need them, and often no real benefit to breaking your back in order to minimize the amount of layers in a project.

2) You don’t have to make stuff you can’t see. Part of that is that you don’t need to rig up things that don’t move during the shot. The lines-and-nodes shot was very quick to make because no part of it responds dynamically to anything. There’s no reason why it should, unless that’s what your experiment is about.

AE Sketch: Spiraling Shape

This came from helping someone animate text similar to the credits of an anime they like.

What I like is They Might Be Giants, so this is Spiraling Shape.

AE Sketches: Macrobinoculars Time Lapse

I recorded a time-lapse of the Star Wars binoculars shot from my last post for someone who requested it. The basic, boring answer to ‘how do I do a shot like that?’ is ‘throw a bunch of shape and text layers around.’

This shot is not my design, the requester shared a photo he snapped of his TV. I’m guessing from Rebels?

After Effects Sketches for 5/2/23

I’ve been spending too much time this week in Discord servers answering basic After Effects questions and trying out the shots that are giving people trouble.