The other day, we celebrated my wife’s birthday with several other people – and she received a balloon. Unfortunately, I had my car door open when Sheri opened hers – and the balloon slipped out and raced into the sky. There was no chance to retrieve it, but in a couple of days, she got another balloon to replace it.
The escaping balloon reminded me of a children’s book Sheri and I created when we were in college. The book told of a wayward red balloon having adventures before being stung by a bee. It fell to the ground and was found by a little boy who put tape over the hole. The balloon was revived and lived a new life.
This would be a new work. I needed to find some music for it – and found a song I wrote a number of years ago called “Growth.” It had a lifting motif and seemed to fit rather well. Then I needed a plot.
The balloon we had was a Mylar red star with Happy Birthday printed on it. I took a picture of it and made it the Hero Balloon. Chat then produced a number of variations on it. These were put on a green background and run through the Animator to produce various motions “in the wind.”
Now for the plot. It is a birthday balloon, so it must belong to a birthday girl. We open by seeing her and her parents leaving The Birthday Palace. Then I had a really tough time getting images to work together. After a lot of frustration, I did what any competent filmmaker would do – I cheated! The balloon simply slipped out of her hand as she was walking.
But the music no longer fit very well to this point. I needed to nail down the birthday theme. So I got out MuseScore and wrote a little “Happy Birthday” theme, then messed with it for a bar or two. The original music then proceeded from that moment.
I made a list of things for the balloon to fly over – and arranged the plot to have it enter a nasty storm. The music didn’t fit – but another tune did – so at that point, I patched the two together. The new version needed a recall of the Happy Birthday theme near the end – and I made a minor motif rest on top of the second song.
For the storm, I had Chat make a nasty cloud, and Animator made it roil. I also got clouds for the bottom of the screen – with green screen – so Animator could move it as well. I put the two together with the moving balloon in between.
Most of the rest of the scenes were easy. I simply moved one of the animated balloon overlays over the scene. Later, I had Animator put motion in the scene – people moved, things happened. For a couple of shots, I wanted the balloon to be covered by part of what was in the background. For example, as the balloon goes into the house, it enters through a window. The closer edge of the window must be in front of the balloon. That meant cutting out just the piece and putting it on top of the scene – matching it perfectly to the background.
Little bits like this help the world look real.
I found that a lot of the moving of the movie could happen through VideoPro – under my own control. AI animation is good. Really good. But hardly perfect. I send an “email” command to my team, but they seem to have their own ideas of what should happen. When I ask Chat to build the prompt for Animator, most of such excursions into visual insanity are avoided. Other instances can be fixed with careful editing!