I made this little “trailer” video for ApocalypseAnimated.com . It’s only 3 minutes long, while there are almost 12 minutes of animation (without even looping!) in the project, so this is but a mere sample of the wonders to find at the website. But this has music so people are likelier to share and attend to it.
There are some technical looping flaws that bother me. Apparently when I export HD video from Moho, it omits the last frame of the loop, causing a jerk in the seams. This doesn’t happen when I export gifs. To make my hi-res video archive perfect, I will have to go back and add one frame and re-render every. single. file. This took 4 boring tedious days last time, and I’m not looking forward to doing it again. But such are the responsibilities of an Apocalypse animator.
Choosing the song was not straightforward. I was really smitten by Fuck Everything by Euringer (aka Jimmy Urine). It would have supplied nice ironic tension because it’s not intentionally about the Apocalypse, and it’s from the point-of-view of two bratty entitled lovers, which is an interesting lens through which to view John of Patmos and his God. But Fuck Everything already has a perfect video, and who knows what kind of headaches it would cause me; even if Jimmy isn’t a copyright maximalist, his songs are distributed in a system that doesn’t recognize Fair Use, and YouTube’s ContentID would surely block even its first upload. I did start making an edit with it, but got frustrated (as one does) and that anxiety contributed to my consideration of an alternative song.
Fortunately I’d already compiled a list of old gospel songs that might work, and the top entry proved a good fit. I found it on the wonderful archive.org, where I always go a-hunting in my research phases. I worried that straight-up gospel wouldn’t be ironic enough with the animation, but When The Fire Comes Down had its own irony, contrasting a cheerful jaunty melody with horrific subject matter. Everything fit right away and I banged out this edit in a single day. Thank you, Internet Archive!
In 1905 Nikolai Morozov released a book titled “Revelation in Thunder and Storm” in which he explained images of the Apocalypse as constelations and celestial bodies. Summary: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aNGuGlA8XjZKwARiDBQkA2mT-o2zbDx9/view
… ah, wow … ok, that’s a lot of different apocalypses … apocalypsii? love the art style in any case, the pairing with the jaunty folksy music really makes it …
Hahaha, totally imagined a cowboy band playing on the foreground under stage light, obliviously singing and narrating about the sky falling down and disasters that transpired just behind them.
(And that sequence of human-grapes, heavenly-applied sickle, and especially the holy giant-foot stomping and squeezing “juice” in sync with the music specially tickles me, I chuckled every time I watched it)
Somehow I wish I could watch this animation with sepia tint and film jitter; that would be totally in-character with the backing track. But since the main purpose of this is a demo reel of your biblical apocalypse motion (e-)book, I think it fits well enough- both for the story and for laughs.
Also yay for freely-available soundtrack.
P.S. For what it’s worth, I have tried watching this video muted with “Fuck Everything” playing in background: while it’s more potent in “angst” (for a lack of better description), I don’t exactly follow- I like your substitute track much better.
P.P.S. I found that when I viewed your “Apocalypse Animated” site in the browser configuration I use, it simply shown up blank. But if I killed off the CSS, it could be viewed (in a barebone fashion, but I don’t mind that too much). Not sure what is the intended purpose of `wp-content/themes/seedlet/style.css?ver=1.2.9` line 566 though, but disabling that seem to make the whole thing display properly.
Fab!