John Van Deusen - “In the Bleak Midwinter”

animated video visualizer project

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tools/skills used: Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo

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John reached out to me just a couple of weeks before the release of his new collection of Christmas songs to ask if I could put together an animated video “visualizer” based off of the album cover. His only real requirement for the animation was for the song titles to appear during each track. Before he sent anything, I told him yes, of course, I’d love to do that. It sounded like a fun challenge.

The album cover was taken from an old painting, evoking a kind of cozy winter nostalgia—kids playing in the snow, horses pulling a sled, a community enjoying a beautiful winter’s day around an old house. There was a lot of story being told in one still image, and I wanted to spread that out over the course of the album.

The first step was reverse engineering—always my favorite. What I had in front of me was a beautiful, flat image populated with people and things. I needed a version that was empty that I could populate over time. I used Affinity Photo and the old Pixelmator app (still my first choice for photo edits, but it’s getting sluggish these days having to work through a translation layer) to erase and “extract” all of the objects by hand, filling the holes they left behind as seamlessly as possible. By the end, I had a working backdrop I was satisfied with.

I’d never used Adobe After Effects before, but I knew that was the right tool for the job. I started poking around, figuring out how to fade elements in over time. I spread all of the objects out across the timeline to give the visualizer a feeling of looking “lived-in”—like it was over the course of a day, with all of these characters slowly coming out to participate in activities. Near the middle of the animation was when the artwork is fully replicated and “built back out”—everyone’s outside, enjoying their day.

I edited a version of the backdrop that looked like the sun had gone down, with purple hues in the sky and life inside the house, with dim light peeking through the windows. As the day gets long, the characters return home, and the art becomes less populated. Then—as “O Holy Night” plays—the visualizer works to evoke the feeling of the evening, with the “sunlight” fading into a cold, dark purple as the album ends with “Silent Night.”

Oh—and most importantly, I added some gentle snowfall throughout the video. YouTube’s default bitrate-starved 1080p setting doesn’t like it much—make sure you set it to 1440p.