Hi folks. I had an idea. So I wrote a piece of flute music and called it “Daybreak”. It’s an educational “warm-up” piece for flute students.
I’m making a video to showcase the sheet music. My idea was to create an animated sunshine effect.
Here’s the effect (no audio):
Here’s the flute video I’m working on (unfinished):
I thought I’d share my process in stages:
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With a marker pen and paper, I drew a basic “sun and rays” - a blob with radiating lines:
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Scanned the image, printed, rescanned with two images per page.
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Printed 7 copies, giving 14 sunshine images.
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Using all the artistic flair I could muster, I changed each image slightly by increasing the width of the rays (randomly), changing slightly the size/shape of the sun (blob). Also I added some more lines and dots.
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Re-scanned all the images, and used the Windows Snipping Tool to capture and save each image as a separtete JPG (named 1.jpg up to 14.jpg. Here’s the image folder (no audio):
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In Shotcut - dragged all 14 images to the playlist.
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Selected image 1 and in properties, I set it to “image sequence” - 3 frames (my video mode is 1080p, 30fps):
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Dragged the image to the timeline - hey presto, it generated a 1-second video.
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Applied 3 filters:
Invert Colours;
Blend Mode (Add);
Colour Grading (highlights set to yellow).
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Copied and pasted the clip 7 times to repeat the animation, giving a 7-second animation.
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Exported as an Mp4.
I now have a sun animation with a yellow sun and a black background, ready to import into a video and apply a chroma-key filter. Woo hoo, thanks, Dan; @shotcut, Brian; @brian and the Shotcut team for Shotcut’s continual, day-in, day-out development!
