Creating Sing-a-Long Animation

Question

I need to create a sing-a-long for the DVD of my musical. Here's what I want to do and I think Motion is probably my best option for doing it, but I'm not exactly sure where to start:
I'd love to do the infamous bouncing ball. The text is across the screen and the ball bounces on top of each word as the viewers are supposed to sing it. As the ball touches the word, the word changes color. The ball also bounces in time to the music and continues it's bounce during pauses in the singing. I fear this may be far too complicated, so here's option two:
Karaoke style. The words are on screen and each word changes color as it's supposed to be sung. Typically in karaoke, it looks like the color is spreading across the words. Again, though, the color changes have to be timed to the music.
I have FCS1 with whichever version of Motion comes with it. Sorry, not at the computer it's on right now. If it's better to do this in some other program, I'd love to hear suggestions. I also have Photoshop, but I've never tried to do animations in Photoshop and would rank my abilities as 'novice', so I would not find this an attractive option.
I appreciate any suggestions.

Answer 1

Hi,
firstly let me say that doing a bouncing ball, or any karaoke style animation is a lot of work. its not hard its just a long slog. So good luck!
Also just to clear, AFAIK, photoshop is for manipulating still images so you would not be able to create animations in it. You could certainly create still frames to help you, in fact light bulb on that has just given me an idea.
For the bouncing ball: For the sake of argument lets assume the song/s are a constant tempo, if not that makes it harder but not impossible. I think first of all you would want to create the bouncing in time ball, in its own project, no words yet. You might make the ball in photoshop, or just simply create a round object in motion and colour it whatever colour you want. So now you animate the ball so that it bounces on the beat, you will export this as a movie later so you only really need it to bounce once, from the top of its fall and back up again. As we dont really need to get involved with physics, you can simply keyframe the end positions in time. Also making the sure the ball stays at the bottom of its bounce for say a couple of frames will maximise the effect of it looking like its hitting on the beat. (You may also want to change all the Interpolations of the keyframes to linear, otherwise they ease in and out and they will never look like they are hitting the beat ).
Once you have this looking nice and its looping away to the beat, you can export it as a movie. We need the alpha channel so use Animation - millions of colours + codec, which will keep the alpha channel. Of course you dont have to use an exported channel you could use a keyframed object throughout the project, it just becomes messy and hard to manage. Nice to lock things down.
Now you need to create a new project and put the words in time roughly with the music. You will of course need to create many text objects for all the lyrics, how many words you can fit on the screen will of course depend on the font and its size, and the length of words. Also of course you will weant to try and split the words into meaningful chunks. You may find that you need to change the font or size even after you have created many objects. There is an easy way to do this: simply cllick and drag the parameter (eg position) from the inspector and drop it onto the object you need to change. Bear in mind this will take keyframes along with it also.
So now you have a track of words that appear in the right time. Again you could export this asa movie and import into another project, or simply drop all the text objects into a group for easy management. Either way the next step is the same.
Once you have all the words in place looking great, all within safe text zones for tv etc, create a copy and colour the text the highlight colour you need. Next you create an animated mask to reveal the coloured word over the normal text. Now thinking about this, this would be a terrible amount of work,, and not the easiest to do either. There must be a simpler way to contruct this!
Anyway once that is done, now simply add the bouncing ball to the mix. You can key frames it position along the words as the track progresses. Now it should bounce up and down in time with the music and hit the word as as they change colour.
well all of this was off the top of my head, as i drank a cup of tea and fired up the machines ready to start the day. There may well be a far easier way to do it all, but don't underestimate the work involved. Hopefully it will have given you some ideas.
regards
adam