Lyrics and Music in Character Animator

[SharonfromMD]

I'm a music teacher and a composer of children's music. I have a number of songs I composed and animated through another company, only to find out that I didn't own the rights to sell them without a $79 transfer fee per video. UGG! So I am redoing everything, but the music. I'm buying puppets because I don't really draw. I've created scenes, etc. Illustrator files I've purchased and edited and then importing them into CA.  So I have been quickly learning Illustrator and Character Animator, and will tackle After Effects shortly, because I don't think there are any transitions in Character animator.

Questions-

1. Is there a text function(for lyrics) in character animator?

2. I am currently developing scenes and every time the lyric changes I create a new scene in Illustrator, and then I import it into CA. Is this the best way to go about this, or would it be better to just put everything into After Effects after the characters and scenes are completed? Or is it a personal preference?

-Sharon from Maryland

[alank99101739]

I don’t know the best ways, but I created a new Illustrator file for each screen of text and imported that as a puppet. I used that for opening credits and closing credits. Using Illustrator gave me complete control over fonts etc, including one mid-video scene where I put a decorative box around the text With a black transparent rectangle behind the text to make the writing easier to read.

If you want to see examples, have a look at Friendship (Extra Ordinary, Episode 1) - YouTube . At the start is the opening credits (a part of a scene). A few seconds in the word “Monday” fades in and out via Premier Pro (I think one later crosses a scene boundary, so I did them all the same).  Then around 8:50 into the video I put a big slab of text up (a bible verse) with decorative background and transparent black to make the white writing easier to read. That is a Illustrator file again. I was not sure how to make Premier Pro put a black rectangle behind text.

The fading in/out is possible in CA as well using Transforms on Opacity, but it was trivial in Premier Pro (you just drag an effect on top)

If you want to do a bouncing ball over the text, you might want to see if easier to do in CA or Premier Pro (or After Effects). Or google search for tutorials! I am sure there are some around.

The main negative I hit with titles in CA was some bits of text I wanted to span CA scenes. I do lots of scene changes you may notice (each camera angle is a new CA scene).  So sometimes I use Premier Pro to put the text over the top instead. I could then control the text appearing and disappearing without concern for where the CA scenes started and ended in Character Animator. Premier Pro has some built in tools for titling as well.

Another negative was having to have one file per piece of text. Felt rather clunky and painful to manage. I really would like to have a series of lines of text independent to something that controlled the font. I want to set the font one globally, not have to edit lots of separate files holding one line of text each.

But I always felt like I was missing something - it felt harder than I expected to get some text on the screen in both cases. So there may be a better way I am unaware of. If you find it, please share! I had plans to do a music video sometime in the future as well. (I have a music track and lyrics, but still tracking down someone with a better voice than mine to sing it!)

Oh, one other thing to note, in Premier Pro there are these guide lines you can make appear - I think something about guarantees of what will be visible on the screen (for TV?). That is not visible in CA.  Probably does not matter if just YouTube etc, but thought I would mention it.

[alank99101739]

I hit POST too soon. I was going to say my gut feel would be do to the lyrics in Premier Pro (or After Affects) because you can drop the text into the timeline easier I think. With CA I suspect you will end up with one Illustrator file per piece of text, which means a puppet per piece of text, which feels like it could get painful if your song is any reasonable length.