Animator Creates Incredible Musical Painting With $5 iPad App.

Thanks to tablet technology, creating a music video has become as simple as swiping a finger — well, sort of.

Art Decade, a band consisting of duo Ben Talmi and Binod Singh Jr., recently debuted its music video,Western Sunrise, which was made almost entirely using Procreate, a $5 iPad app.

“I really recommend it to anyone who does storyboards, concept art and animators, filmmakers, producers, whatever — this is the future,” says the video’s lead animator and director, Alexander Whitney. (You can see the full making-of here.)

The band hired Whitney to infuse as much visual art as possible. The process, which was mostly done on aniPad 2, took four months, but the result was strikingly vibrant.

“The four-month process was arduous. I had all of the character animation assets complete, and then the rest — backgrounds, effects animation and color correction — was up to me,” says Whitney.

Although creation relied heavily on the iPad 2, Whitney also used the iMac keyboard. The artist had to invest in orthopedic gloves to protect his fingers — eight to 12 hours per day of pounding away at the keys can cause some fatigue.

Aside from ProCreate, Whitney used other programs, like Adobe After Effects and Mocha. “I used After Effects to compose all of the elements, and also to create elements like the water, mist, clouds, as well as the final paint filter called Video Gogh,” says Whitney. “Mocha was used to track the position of the character.”

Art Decade’s singer/songwriter Ben Talmi says he had a very clear vision of Impressionism in motion for this video.

“Whitney actually ended up surpassing what I thought was even possible,” says Talmi.

Do you think this is the future for art direction? Let us know in the comments.

 Christine Erickson of Mashable 

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