Each video involves many steps and a lot of planning. Visualizing the end result is important, but sometimes, once you do see it, you can get overwhelmed. This is why planning and understanding the best message or what you are trying to communicate is the first step. In this case, with The Piano Fox, it’s a song. My first step is to build the sheet music and the soundtrack.

To create the sheet music, I use my basic music theory knowledge and of course, Adobe Illustrator. I export a PNG file and drop it in After Effects.

To build the soundtrack, I use a couple free programs. I use GarageBand to create my musical instruments note by note. I’ll export a track for each note: c, d, e, f, etc. Then, I use Reaper to edit the tracks and export the final WAV files.

Once I have the sheet music and the soundtrack, I create the character. To create the character I first build it in Illustrator using a strict layering sequence and specific names. I also bring in a piano, created in Illustrator, with layers for each key. Once the Illustrator files are created, I bring those into Adobe Character Animator. Here is where the animation and movement is created after rigging the characters arms and legs and any other elements, like a piano. Then I export a movie file with the alpha channel selected to get a transparent background. 

Then, I brig all of these files in to After Effects. Here’s where I create the Keyboard Glow file and animate the movement with all of the other files creating many compositions embedded in other compositions to ultimately export the final MPG file.

In a nutshell, this is my process for each video and in a lot of cases the process I use to systematically break down any project that I take on from beginning to end.