Joey Ku

Characters performing in sync to a piece of music

About: This technical document is a guide to how the animals from the animated short, The Carnival of The Animals are able to perform in synchronisation to the finale piece of Camille Saint-Saëns’ music with the same name. To create the desired outcome, programs used were Autodesk Maya, GarageBand, Adobe products such as Premiere Pro, Audition and After Effects.

Preparing the Music To create some dynamics within some parts of the music, Adobe Audition and GarageBand were used to apply effects such as reverb and delay. This would be later exported as an mp4 and imported into premiere pro to go along with the animatic. This would be used as rough guidelines as to where and when should the animals be performing. Once the animatic is perfected, the animals would be modelled, textured, rigged and skinned, ready for animating.

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Adding reverb effect onto a selected track

To add a metronome on GarageBand, just select the little icon on the right

Metronome can also be activated on Audition by going to multi-track mode, select the track> multi-track>enable metronome. There is also an option to change the tempo of the metronome within the menu.

Understanding the movement

Using references and creating drawn cycles helped understand how animals move like from how a butterfly flies to how an elk walks. The timing of each animals’ movements were taken into account as well to dance in time to the music. For each individual animal, they are designated to a specific instrument and using its rhythm, a metronome would be added for beat emphasis and as a rough timing for each body part. To do this, the music had to be taken into Adobe Audition, edited for the specific animal’s part and later export the music into an .aiff file format. Doing this allows Maya, which can only read .aiff, .wav and sometimes mp3 formats to be able to use sound as well as displaying the music along the timeline.

Importing sound into Maya

Once the music file is imported into Maya, the timeline will display waveforms of the music in green based on the music’s dynamics created from the beats of the metronome and the emphasis effects (3). Using the music on the timeline can help indicate the timing of the piece as well as providing audio and visual playback.

To import a sound file, first go to file>import and click on the options box beside it (1). This brings up a pop up window (2). The only setting that needs changing is in the general options tab. Click on the drop down menu in file type, select audio, click on import and select the sound file.

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Getting the timing Once the beats are familiarised, there are some things to take note when it comes to animating a character in sync to a piece of music: • The duration of the legs from being raised to landing on the ground. • If the character has more than two legs, the number of legs it travel on.

As The Carnival of The Animals piece is slightly fast pace (99 bpm), the metronome beats once every fifteen frames. With this in mind combining some specific horse dressage movements like the passage and piaffe, and looking at how the quadruped travels on two legs, the timing of when the feet touches the ground is taken account. This comes to a rough timing of six to seven frames which once one cycle of a leg is complete, it can be looped. Each key frame from various parts of the character's body should be roughly or be kept at the same time.

Because the music is played throughout the animation, some animals may travel quicker or slower than the others. As the Sea Mink travels in sync to the music, the beats could be doubled or halved, to harmonize the other animal’s movements.

Getting the timing

Once all walks and or dance cycles are completed, the metronomes sounds can be taken out and be

replaced with the original or edited music or be added in post production.