A day of work on the Frans Hals video, mainly the final tweaks. It's amazing that I could make a video of such complexity in two days, most of the work was done in a few hours yesterday, but the final changes take 80% of the time for any creative project. Here's a still of the state so far:
The video tends to look like the titles to a James Bond film, with sweeping, sliding sections of film flying over an animated background. I did it by creating a complete animated film in Argus, using flat white boards to represent areas where the video will appear. When complete, I noted the frames where the video inserts are needed, then made a second film of edits from the filmed footage. Both that edit and the animated one were synchronised with the music.
Then adjusted the colouration of the film, and rendered out the main animation without the white boards, plus a second animation of only the white boards; the mask for the film. Both were combined using Avisynth. I turned down the opacity a little so that some of the background shows through the film, to make it look more integrated.
As a last step, I added a picture frame object to those white squares, to give them some sort of border. This is the most digital looking aspect, but it looks better, just about, than no frame at all. Certainly very different. Tweaking the settings for the frame texture and the reflection map is rather time consuming and hard to get right.
I found time to add the remaining 16 digital images to Society6 and my website, so all of my 2002-2003 digital prints are now on sale again, but I still have the album artwork. There are many more album covers now. Society6 seems suprisingly dead and tired, little changed since when I first left the site in 2018. A lot of art is from that date, and their own blog has hardly any interaction. The site could use new ideas; better pricing controls, sale options, limited edition items, digital items, 3D virtual rooms to view items, Patreon integration, contests... lots could be added. Itch and Bandcamp do things much better.
