WHAT

“Super Hero” is a music video/animation for a song composed by William Maples. Mr. Maples was a former high school teacher of mine who would perform his songs periodically at the beginning of most classes. I’ve always wanted to do something with the song, so I thought the senior project for ICAM would be a good chance to do it. My project will be a visual representation that complements the audio of William Maples’ song.

WHY

With the internet open to the general public, anything can be posted and shown to the general public; people have the freedom to show or say anything they want, but that’s not always a good thing. With the overwhelming influx of content on the web, it’s hard to sort through everything and find quality content. My project, simply, hopes to add something to the net that people will look at and think a lot of energy and care was put forth when it was created. Also, I hope it is something that is aesthetically pleasing, and something that hasn’t been seen before. Visually, it’ll be different from other music videos and animations that are out there; with “Super Hero,” there’s the literal interpretation of the song (that of a super hero neglecting his significant other to protect the world/citizens) and then there’s the metaphorical interpretation. The literal interpretation of the song will be in color and look like traditional animation, with clean, crisp lines, while the metaphorical aspect of the song will be grayscale and will have a “sketchbook” feel to it. By putting together two different styles of animation, I hope to bring them together and create a coherent story.

HOW

To create the animations, I first have to film the actions in real life, and then transfer them to Adobe Flash, since I’m “rotoscoping” the images (rotoscope is the process of taking real footage and tracing the footage to create an animated version of the video). After the footage is converted into Flash, it is then colored, frame by frame. To create the metaphor part of the music video, I do the same process of first rotoscoping the footage, but instead of coloring as the next step, I print each individual frame, and hand color each frame using TRIA Markers. After all the frames have been colored, I will scan the frames, import them into Adobe Photoshop to crop the images, and create the final animation of the cropped images in Flash.

My project will be a music video for William Maples’ song, “Super Hero.” Mr. Maples was my high school English teacher, and he was my teacher from sophomore through senior year. Once in a while he would play us some music that he listened to, like Pink Floyd and The Pixies, and sometimes he would sing some of his original songs. At first I thought it was weird because before this, I just thought of teachers as teachers and nothing else. Mr. Maples opened my eyes to new types of music. “Super Hero” was one of the songs he would sing to the class, and I’ve always loved the imagery that it presented when listening to it; when I was younger, I’ve always been into comic books, so my imagination ran wild when I heard this song.

The song is about a superhero who has a girlfriend, and he is always leaving her to go off and save the world. The song is narrated by the superhero’s arch nemesis, who is in love with the superhero’s girlfriend. What makes this song interesting to me is that unlike all other the supervillains in cartoons and movies that are hell bent on world domination and getting rich, the villain in this song is doing all of these heinous acts to distract the superhero from his girlfriend, causing a dissention between the two, so he can profess his love for her. It is kind of romantic, in a dark and twisted way.

In the song, there is a literal translation of it, and then there is the metaphorical translation, that is, being consumed by work and money and neglecting your significant other. I want to show both sides of the story, and to show the literal and the figurative, there will be two contrasting styles of animation. For the literal interpretation of the song, the animation would use vibrant colors, and clean, crisp animations that are reminiscent of cartoons on television. As for the metaphor, since real life isn’t as exciting and action packed as the fantasy world, the animation will be in grayscale and will have the look and feel of sketch drawings. I want these two styles to mesh together and form one coherent story.

I do a lot of internet surfing in my spare time and like to watch various viral clips, flash animations, and music videos. These outlets open up a lot gates for artists to be creative, yet I don’t think they’re being used to their full potential. Take for example the website Newgrounds.com, a website dedicated to showcasing various flash animations. While going through the site I can’t help but notice all of the half-assed scribble animations that are submitted onto the site. It’s not common to see work from people who put in time and pride in their work, and who really think about what they put on the internet for people to view. Also, there’s not a lot of variety in music videos; most videos just have the artist performing in front of a camera and maybe have a little storyline here and there, and I want to change all of that.

I’m a visual person, so I like it when something is done different. By mixing two story telling devices and creating something visually stimulating, I hope to show the audience of my piece something that they’ve never seen before, and in turn inspire them to create something else that is creative and interesting. With the internet, everyone in the public has access to it, but that means there’s a greater chance of subpar work.

The Super Hero project exists within the context of all other flash animations and music videos already in abundant on the World Wide Web. I don’t expect for the project to get a lot of views, but that’s not what I’m worried about. When people view my project, I want them to know that a lot time and effort was put forth upon creating it. When I first thought of my project, the first work that I thought of that related the most to it was A-Ha’s music video for “Take on Me.” That music video mixed real life footage with sketch drawings of the artist; that style wasn’t something that was seen a lot in 1985, and was an innovative depiction of a music video.

Another innovative way to do a music video can be seen at: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/382402. The creator of this music video, Dustball, experiments with stop motion photography. Stop motion isn’t new, but it’s the way Dustball lip syncs the photographs with the music is intriguing. Another of Dustball’s music videos, “Play More” (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/291851) uses rotoscoped imagery to portray improvised percussion music. These animations separate themselves from the pack of mundane and routine videos, something that my own project hopefully does as well.