The Decades Come All Together

Hey guys, it's been a while since I last blogged. If you saw my blog from this time last year, you would see I was working on my eMagine  project. eMagine is our states multi-media festival that is judged for Video, Animation, Graphic Design and Web. Last year I entered a project called Atlas. This year I am doing a more somewhat out of the box idea for my project.

I am personally into music, no I do not play a musical instrument,

but I listen to music all the time, even as I am typing this I am listening 

to music. I though one day, some people now a days don't even know who Elvis

The Beatles or even The Who. I thought it would be cool to make an animation  that

shows that yes the music from the early 1950's is different than our music today, but 

that it is actually similar. 

I started by making a list of songs that would go with each decades,

then narrowing it down to three songs per. decade. I then made what

I call a modern mixtape on my MacBook on Garage Band, with about

10 seconds per. song. This took me about a full week to get it exactly 

how I wanted it. 

I started with the song Rock Around the Clock By Bill Haley and His Comets.

My mom had said that the song reminded her of the old show, Happy Days

because one of their seasons opening titles were set to the song. So I made a 

record rotating with swing dancers on either side of it, with the words Happy Days

appearing above it  to mimic the original intro. I then have the record fly off screen

to transition to the next song.

The next song is Jail House by the king himself, Elvis Presley. 

I took the video made back in the 50's and separated it into its

separate frames so I could frame by frame drawing of his dance.

I then copied the finished danced and shrunk it down, so he could

have background dancers. They dance in sync until they fade out to

the next song.

The next song is Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry. I watched several

videos of Mr. Berry's performances and noticed that instead of synchronized 

dancers, he had gogo dancers in the background. I then faded out Elvis and his dancers

then slowly faded in Mr. Berry and his gogo dancers. 

The difficulties I am facing with this project, is transitioning the songs 

that don't really go together from the different decades. I also need to know

if this project is actually award worthy, or if I need to be doing something

else completely different. I have worked really hard so far, and hope to win 

a pixel award this year. The test render is below of the 1950's decade finished.

I need to fix the blurry Elvis. I feel that I have worked extremely hard, and 

just want all the hard work to pay off.