Music videos made in AGS (new one added June 17, 2018!)

Started by Fitz, Sun 16/10/2016 19:57:55

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Fitz

And here's another one -- which I did as a fan tribute for one of my favorite synthwave artists, VHS Glitch (and which he liked so much it is now the official video for the song)! This one I've done mostly in MOHO/Anime Studio, which I got recently and started playing around with -- BUT after some initial trials I decided animating all the keystrokes would be crazy, I made virtual organs in AGS. Then I grabbed the footage of myself whamming the hell out of my trusty keyboard and put the animation of that into the animation (laugh)


Mandle

Amazing music and also an amazing process you must have gone through to create the video...

I didn't quite understand though: Do you mean you played along with the music on your keyboard in your AGS "game" to capture the animation of the keys? (which turned out to be the buttons on a boombox, which is an AWESOME twist!!!)

If so: did you play along in real time or slow down the track?

Fitz

I played along to the song -- which I uploaded into the game -- in real time. The result isn't great partly because there seems to be a bit of a lag in the youtube video (while it seemed to sync nicely in the original screengrab) but mostly because I don't know jack about music and so I just hit any key when I felt I should, all too often missing my cue completely, especially in the faster parts (laugh)

Danvzare

Quote from: Fitz on Tue 10/01/2017 20:16:00
I played along to the song -- which I uploaded into the game -- in real time. The result isn't great partly because there seems to be a bit of a lag in the youtube video (while it seemed to sync nicely in the original screengrab) but mostly because I don't know jack about music and so I just hit any key when I felt I should, all too often missing my cue completely, especially in the faster parts (laugh)
The effect is still awesome though, and I honestly didn't notice the lag or the fact that it's just hitting keys at random, until you mentioned it.

Fitz

Yeah, I was hoping a greater sense of "WTF is going on?" and the slow revealing of other details would detract the viewers' attention from the keys (laugh) But I did go through the whole song and felt I found my inner Chopin by the end of it ;)

Fitz

Here's a Halloween special!


Some time ago, after seeing my first video, the French synthwave band ELEVN, whom I'd been following with great interest from the start, approached me about creating visualizations for their live gigs. And so, over months of blood, sweat and tears, driven by madness and black magic, I concocted the darkest, craziest creation of my entire life. This time it's pure-bred hellspawn of AGS, with no other magic involved: inanimate objects and undead characters moving around, vanishing and reappearing, changing size and tint in real time by the power of The Code... MUAHAHAAAA!!! (laugh)

eri0o

This is amazing. I love this. Is there any part of the code where you did a smart trick to get a specific effect, that would be cool to mention? And when developing, how did you go to not have to play whatever you developed before over and over?

Fitz

#27
Basically, the video is nothing BUT non-stop trickery ;) Perhaps I could've taken it easy here and there, with a simplier, more time-efficient solution -- but I wanted to challenge myself. What I'm proud of the most is that there's very little frame-by-frame animation (other than random background effects like rain, snow or asphalt - which were usually made by flipping a single image left/right or up/down, anyway). It's usually having multiple objects on top of each other and unveiling or hiding them dynamically throughout the scene by manipulating Transparency (like in the scene where the vampire rides through the city) or changing color (such as the city exploding). But these are rather basic. The one I'm most proud of is the cat in the headlights. This one has two masks for the face: one for when it's in the dark, one when lit -- and behind those semi-transparent masks, four object moving and scaling simultaneously to simulate dilating pupils AND two more for the light reflections. There's also one thing in AGS I discovered only while making this video that just blew my mind: rotating things! 8-0 I've never even thought it possible, given the fact that it's a sprite based-engine -- but I blame it on my superficial knowledge of the program. It's not super easy to do, either, but it's feasible. And so, the witch doing a wheelie is just a static image of the woman on the motorcycle being rotated. Of course there's the hair in the wind, which I had to animate and move around separately - since the wind still blows in one direction, which doesn't line up with the angle of the motorcycle, and also dynamic sprites ignore transparency.
As for watching the video over and over -- yup, no easy or failproof way around it ;) Doing my first AGS music video, I did cut the audio into smaller chunks, worked on a few scenes at a time, and then joined them later, but it'd go terribly out of sync sometimes. So this time I only did two major splits, and even that was a pain to sync right afterwards. Multiple viewings and screen captures were a sad necessity, especially since my current work station is over 6 years old and it'd usually take 2-3 takes before it'd chew through all the graphic assets and run without a hitch. Perhaps/probably there's some very simple solution, like a code that would start playing the audio from a specific point, but I haven't looked hard enough ;)

eri0o

Thanks for the write up Fitz, I really liked reading through. And thanks for the how you did the cat eye pupils, that was very interesting :] Lots of ideas for cutscenes now. (laugh)

Fitz

You're welcome :) One other thing you'll need to consider when making sophisticated cutscenes within AGS -- especially if they're supposed to run in sync with music -- is that people will run your game on different specs, and very often the graphics, especially in higher resolutions or when screen-captured without compression (on programs like FRAPS), will lag, thus ruining the desired effect. So while it's perfectly feasible to make cutscenes in-engine, it's probably best to screen-grab them, upload them to the project and play them as videos.

Cassiebsg

Again, this is superb and mind blowing, Fitz! :-D
You did an awesome work there, and hope the band is happy with the end result! (they better be, or we'll unleash the hounds of hell on them (laugh) ).
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Fitz

Took me a while to get back into the swing of things - but I'm back with a new video made in AGS:


The song by the talented singer/songwriter/pianist Jennifer Doll nudged me in just the direction I'd been wanting to go: to do something cartoony and weird, silly and dark at the same time. Think Tim Burton meets Amanita Design. It also gave me the inspiration to keep going with these little, simple videos I make in AGS. I was actually originally making this one in Open Shot Video Editor - but when you have a 7 year old computer, playing with video editing software is more dangerous than juggling bricks of uranium. So after the damn thing started spazzing and almost fried my CPU, I went back and re-assembled the video in AGS. Oh, the things you can do with dynamic sprites and some tricky coding. Suffice it to say that there's barely any frame-by-frame animation - except the rolling paper ball, because I was lazy. Everything else - characters extending arms, the falling droplet, the leaf, the chewing caterpillar's head - is rotated/resized in real time by code. It seems I also figured out the code for character jumping (with the slow deceleration in mid-air and getting pulled down by Earth's gravity). Wish I actually knew the first thing about designing platformers because I could totally make one now ;)

selmiak

Oh this is nice :D
how long did it take you to paint all the base images?

Cassiebsg

There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Fitz

Thanks :)

Selmiak: Haven't really calculated, but I generally consider them fairly simple: firsr I do lineart in vector graphics using Inkscape, then convert them to bitmaps and color them in GIMP. Most of the time I was too lazy to take out my tablet & I did most of it with a mouse. I wanted to take it easy with this project, as opposed to my previous video. The whole video took about 4 weeks, 4 days a week, to make - including the computer crisis, the resulting depression, then finally re-doing the first minute of it in AGS. All in all, took MUCH longer & was way harder than anticipated - but still I'm happy to have gotten it done, really needed that.

Already preparing for another project - this time using a 4-color palette similar to that from Gray!

Fitz

And there it is: a new video I mentioned in the post above:


I was listening to this song by Here On Mars on one hot, sunny day & started slowly dozing off. Then this dream vision of a blue cow with orange patches against a red Martian sky hit me. That's when I knew it has to become a video. Originally I planned it to be just a series of static images of cows grazing, repeating and progressively turning more and more psychedelic. But the song is just so clever and insightful that I had to do more than that to do it justice. I tried to reference the lyrics in creative ways - with cows at the center of the metaphors. The result is six minutes of complete madness that might only make sense to me ;)

Pling!

As smooth as mindblowing.
Spoiler
Calfin Klein :-D
[close]
 

Fitz

That was just one of many bovine puns in there. (laugh) There were much moooooo brands briefly/barely visible in the "haute cowture" segment as well as the TV channels, later on. Had tons of fun with that, and actually had to leave a lot of ideas out for lack of time/space in the video.

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