How to create the Sean John intro

So… I skipped planning and continued with the most important part. The music.

Music
I didn’t like the songs. They where too slow for what I wanted to do. So the first thing I did was to start cutting up the music. Back then I was on a PC and used a software called Sound Forge. It was a bit messy because it didn’t support more than one layer. Today I use Mac OS X and Soundtrack Pro for music.

They had some audio recordings of Ghostface Killah from the Wu-Tang Clan talking enthusiastically about Sean John. Started cutting that up and made a small story around his words and lyrics from different Bad Boy songs. Found that I could edit them so that they would sing about my intro.

When the story was right, I made some parts slow and strange, added a sexy zipper sound before the R’n'B part, added clicks, blips, drops and h-h-huck ups, so that the music would be fun to animate. For the ending with Ghostface, I used a DJ software called
Traktor, which you can scratch with. Scratched Ghostface’s voice, so the ending tag-line would get a bit more interesting.

It didn’t sound good, right away. Created one version, then version 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. It’s very easy to give up when it doesn’t sound right. You’ve got to continue tweaking and changing until you are satisfied. If it’s impossible, take a break. Sleep, next morning ideas will come to you with ease (compared to yesterday night).

Production
The first thing I did was to have a look at the images I was going to use. Picked out the best ones and then picked the first image.

Ghostface Says

Started of with the first image and was going to sync something to the Ghostface voice in the beginning of the intro. Adobe After Effects is a program used normally for video. In After Effects, you can convert audio to keyframes data, allowing you to change scale, position or anything you want really, to the wave curves of the sound. You can also export text and boxes to Flash (swf) as vector graphics with it’s export. Did this with a red square in position

of the eyes, I just thought it looked cool.

Storage Overview
In my first Sean John intro (this is actually intro number 2), I used a style made with “textile” cut-outs and dotted lines. I wanted to keep that style and make it more advanced. Maybe a map would look cool? A mix of maps and textile outlining?

Googled for orienteering maps images.
Found a map that looked OK, started outlining and made it look like the picture below. When I had something that looked good, I started key-framing it and deleting parts of the graphics. When I had an animation complete, I reversed the keyframes. This is an animation technique I use very often. Have all the graphics ready, sort them up in different layers. Use as many as you need, no need to be cheap with layers – they are free.

Silk Shirt
This effect is made with masks and Graphic objects. I rarely use Movie Clip’s. Want to see everything that is happening in my timeline without having to export or test the movie. Keeping it simple, is something you will have lots of use for when you go back later to your project and need to fix something or export it as video.

If you create several different copies of your image, then just change the brightness on the top one of them, add a mask to it with a Graphic object, you will get this effect. It’s pretty easy and how the possibility of looking more advanced than it is. You should try this sometime.

3D Transition

In the song, I made a pretty cool sound of a hacked up Yo-yo-yo-yo and then the sound of a toy pipe. For graphics and animation, I wanted to do something special. Something similar to an American flag, no colors and surprise people with some 3D.
I started sketching up this flag over the character in the chair, when it looked cool enough I then copied the vector graphics to a new file, exported it to Illustrator (ai) then opened Cinema 4D and imported the Illustrator file. I created a camera (don’t worry I will explain how I did this in a tutorial) that I moved into position so that the camera would be in the same position as the scene in Flash, with the graphics in the right place. I then started working on making the graphics longer and more complex, outside of the cameras angle. At the other end, I formed them so they would shape around the next picture. Then I moved and keyframed the camera so it would move away from the first position, fly through the lines and stop at a new position.

Export to Flash, import in Flash, then start working on the details. It didn’t look or feel good directly, had to work on each frame. It’s better to export many many frames from Cinema 4D, than too few. The image didn’t fit correctly with the 3D transition, so I had to make some form of solution, I made a red ball to I changed frame by frame to look more like the naked parts of the model picture. Added some numbers, to distract the viewer, making people think it’s more complex than it really is, soon I had something that looked good. To be continued.

The Scribble/Scale Transition
The next transition was also simply improvised. I previously added a strange sound to the music, that I could sync animation to. Scaled the first picture down, with tempo of the scribble sound and scaled the new one up. This wasn’t made in Flash 8, where you can make very smooth image scales. To get motion blur on the images I had to create the blur in Photoshop and import to Flash. Or make a ‚Äúfake‚Äù motion blur, by outlining and alpha. See the following pictures. It doesn’t look very good as image, it’s first when you view the animation it looks good. This was made with trial and error, try and correct, try and correct.