The Making of
Faire Sweet Cruell

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Step One

The first thing I did was create an animation of the song lyrics in Flip Boom. Being a musician, I thought that if I assigned a musical note time value to each word animation frame, the words would play back at the rhythm of the song. So, for the first verse I drew the note value of each word on each frame to help me keep track.

Initially, I used the value of one quarter note per one still animation frame. This, of course, did not work. Some words got swallowed and lost because the play-back frame rate was faster than the value I had assigned. I suppose I could figure out how to make the frame rates match, but why waste my time doing that when I can edit so quickly in Final Cut Pro?

So, I ended up animating each word of both verses with six animation frames per word in Flip Boom, then exporting as a QuickTime movie, and then importing that movie into Final Cut Pro and editing the animation right on top of the audio file for rhythm placement. (You could also use Final Cut Express and iMovie for editing like this.)

Below is a snapshot of the timeline in Final Cut Pro of the edit of Verse One's animation. (Note the musical notation in the upper right hand corner of each thumbnail.)

Below is a snapshot of the timeline in Final Cut Pro of the edit of Verse Two's animation. (Note the absence of musical notation in the upper right hand corner of each thumbnail because I didn't need it since each word was getting six frames in Flip Boom.)