Synopsis

Take a turbulent ride with Aimee Mann in a pop-up paper airplane book that dances and bounces along to her song Pavlov's Bell.

Background

In 2002, there was an exhibition on vintage pop-up books at the Los Angeles Central Library. Amazing stuff - what if these were animated?

At the same time, an upgrade to Adobe After Effects introduced three-dimensional functionality to the program - and I wanted to try this out on a real project.

I had this idea of creating a three-dimensional pop-up book and animating it to the beat and rhythm of the song Pavlov's Bell - which had been on repeat since I bought Aimee's 2002 album Lost In Space. I interpret the song to be about a physically and emotionally turbulent cross-country airplane ride - perfect.

The concept was to create this pop-up book and set up several virtual cameras in After Effects to capture all the action from various angles and edit it together in Final Cut Pro.

My computer system during production of this video was an iMac G4/800. It was nice and fast for Icarus of Pittsburgh, but it soon became apparent that it would not be enough for Pavlov's Bell. My calculations were that this would take the iMac six weeks running twenty-four-seven. And that was without the inevitable tweaks and rendering errors.

The beauty of the Internet. I put up a call on my web site for gigaflops - the thought being that I would distribute a few seconds of the video to a few dozen people spread out all over the world and get this thing rendered in no time.

No one responded.

In the end, I edited the video in After Effects and rendered it as one file with no editing in Final Cut. It still took a few weeks to render, but manageable.

One of these days I will render the individual cameras as originally intended and do some sort of director's cut - but in retrospect that sounds kind of anal - 'cause the end product looks pretty damn cool.