Hi folks, I’m just a little excited about this new text animation I’ve done so I thought I’d post it here - it’s a work in progress and it will become part of a tutorial for musicians and music students, on keys and key signatures.
I also wanted to share a few tecniques I used to make it.
Basically - LOTS of black and white PNGS! - I thnk about 150! - some created in Serif’s PagePlus software, others created by extensive use of Shotcut’s Eport Frame feature - which is now very simple and easy to use - thanks to @shotcut! Yes, it’s great that you now press CTRL/SHIFT/E, then RETURN, then go to “recents”, double-click and drag down to the timeline. No need to faff around typing in incremental file-names. A real godsend!!
The letters of the grid ( A B C D etc) were created in Pageplus - after laying out the whole grid, I then covered up the white letters with black boxes and uncovered the white letters one at a time. I used a really useful Auto HotKey Script I wrote to automate the process of exporting each uncovered PNG and saving each PNG with an incremental file-name.
The animated grid lines - I created just one vertical and one horizontal line (white-on-black) using keyframes in SC then dragged multiple copies of each into the timeline, re-positioning them and applying Blend Mode (ADD) to them to overlay.
Anyway, I just made it and haven’t checked it fully but I’ve posted it here for anyone’s interest. Any thoughts gratefully received!
D’un point de vue musical, moi non plus je n’ai pas compris grand chose. Par contre, je n’ose pas vous demander une copie d’écran de la chronologie, mais je me doute que cela a du vous demander quelques heures de travail et je veux bien croire au nombre d’images que vous mentionnez au vu du résultat. Bravo et merci pour le partage.
From a musical point of view, I didn’t understand much either.
On the other hand, I don’t dare to ask you for a screenshot of the timeline, but I suspect that it must have taken you a few hours of work and I’m willing to believe in the number of images that you mention in view of the result.
Congratulations and thank you for sharing.
You are a musician playing a piece that has 4 flats in the key signature. What key is it in?
Answer - Looking at the flats chart, go down to the number 4, look across and the answer is either F minor, or A flat major. Incidentally, F minor is known as the relative minor of A flat major, and vice versa.
How many sharps are there in the key of F shap major?
Answer: look at the sharps chart - right hand “MAJ” column. Go down to F sharp, then across to the left. The answer is 6 sharps. Incidentally, they appear on the music, in order, F sharp, C sharp, G sharp, D sharp, G sharp and E sharp, as you can see from the wordsearch box.
You are a music student taking a music theory exam the question is, “write a treble clef, then a key signature of 5 sharps followed by the major scale of that key”.
Answer: look at the sharps chart. The wordsearch box tells you that the 5 sharps are F sharp, C sharp, G sharp, D sharp and G sharp. So write these 5 sharps just after the clef. Now look at the row marked “5”. looking across to the right-hand column tells you the key is B major, so write in that scale.
Thanks guys. As is often said on its forum, “This is fixed for the next release” …
Reminds me of that old joke “What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft ---- A flat miner”
An instructive little video for the students and very well created. There may be other software that is designed specifically for animation, like Pencil-2D, Krita and such-like (see below), but it goes to show how well Shotcut can be used to do this too.
@jonray as a mental exercise I thought I’d try to reproduce the “FLATS” table animation in HTML/CSS.The file is considerably less than 100 lines, about 3/4 of it is CSS and not a single PNG file in sight. It took me about 5 hours to develop and debug the animation. It isn’t EXACTLY the same animation, and I show the numbers first, as I think it is more logical.
Just download the following text file, change its extension from “.txt” to “.html” and run it in a browser - Enjoy.
