Our latest short film Good Patrick Henry is an ode to the great yet all-but-forgotten Patriot Patrick Henry. The film is based on the song produced and recorded by the Mike Church Show Band.

This exciting and visually stunning film was made using 2D images in 3D space. Video editor Clint Stroman explains the process:

The Good Patrick Henry video was done by, primarily, taking the graphic images from The Spirit of 76, arranging them in 3D space in After Effects (mainly moving them forward and backward along the Z-Axis) and moving a “camera” around them. The real pictures (Washington on the Delaware and the Democrats) have the 3D look by taking the original photo, cutting out the foreground, completely painting in the background, and then applying the same technique to those in After Effects as I did to the graphic images.

Coming from a film background I like to use depth of field and lighting techniques as much as possible when animating. You'll see in many of the shots that there will be a rack focus from one character to another or as the camera pushes in the background will go out of focus. You'll notice that many of the interior shots are fairly dark, this is mainly because there were being lit with only one “light” source as this type of lighting tends to have a more dramatic effect but doesn't make any sense when the characters are outside on bright, sunny days.

Henry talking at the beginning of the video was achieved by having the body on the base layer, then having different mouths layered on top of it and using the time remap tool to sequence them so I could just type a number when I wanted a certain mouth. 0 = Not talking, 1 = Mouth Slightly open, etc.

The green video at the end was edited separately in Final Cut then imported into After Effects where it had the color and pulsing effects added to it. Yeah, it looks a little 1984-ish, not my original intent, but when I realized how well it worked I went with it.

The closing titles were simply a matter of finding the right camera lens and right arrangement of the titles to make it look like they were actually flying through them. At first I thought a wider lens would be best for this effect but I ended up going with a longer lens and making the titles further apart and speeding up the cameras animation.