The Animation Track

The Details

Client: Class project (extended for personal portfolio)
Task: Create a 30-second promo for the Truman State University’s new animation track
Purpose: To recruit new students to the track
Software used: Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, QuickTime, Logic Pro X, and Melodyne ARA
End product: a two and a half minute song and music video

The Concept

When I was asked to create a video that would get kids to join Truman’s animation track (the track that I majored in), I knew things that I did NOT want my promo to be. I didn’t want it to be stale. I didn’t want to go on and on about numbers and statistics because, as a kid, that’s not something that would excite me. However, there were things I knew I wanted to communicate in the promo. Truman’s animation department (as it was at the time o this video’s creation) was the Wild West in the sense of how much was yet to be explored, and I wanted to create a song that would get stuck in the heads of kids to pump them up for the amount of potential that existed within the field of animation and within Truman’s track specifically. I wanted to make something fun and silly that inspired and truly showcased what our department was capable of.

The Process

The Animation Track, although it is a video chock full of animation, was ironically not really an animation job for me. Without a doubt, I would consider it an editing job as the majority of my time was spent editing and organizing video clips and animations that were created by the talent listed in the video’s credits. The music was composed and mixed using Logic Pro X and Melodyne ARA and the video was edited using After Effects, compiled in Premiere Pro and exported with Media Encoder.

Music, Sweet Music

Eight years of middle/high school band gave me a love for music, and ever since then, I’ve been composing and studying little bits of music of my own. Inspired heavily by YouTube channels Schmoyoho, Pogo, Melodysheep and Chetreo, autotune remixing had been a big dream of mine for awhile now. There’s something kind of magical about creating music out of spoken words and encapsulating a message in melody. Melodyne ARA is the software I used for autotuning this piece, and I actually purchased it specifically for this project. It was an absolute joy to finally fulfill that dream.

It was not an easy dream to fulfill however. The first step in creating the song for this video involved conducting a 15-minute interview with my professor, Rusty Nelson. Then, I had to go back into that interview and listen for phrases that both were spoken with a sort of melody AND that made sense lyrically in the song I wanted to create. Each phrase was assigned a timestamp and the interview was split into these pieces in Logic Pro. The melody was composed using the software instruments provided in Logic and then the interview pieces were transposed to match the pre-written melody. It was a long process, but definitely worth it to be able to say that I have my own song out in the world.

Look at all This Talent!

As shown in the credits, The Animation Track is comprised of animated content contributed by 21 different Truman animators. For me, especially since the track was so new, it was important that as many past and present Truman animators were included in my promo to really showcase the breadth of what’s come from the department. Unfortunately, this meant keeping communication organized between 20 different people, which was the most amount of people I’d worked with on a single project up until this point. Although a bit intimidating at first, I found the challenge to not be as difficult as I'd originally anticipated, and I now look forward to working with groups of people in the future!