Hopscotch

Brass sextet with percussion. Animation with font/text.

When synchronizing music and visuals, it's usually preferable to construct the visual element first, and then compose the audio element so that it synchronizes to the visual track. But in the case of "Hopscotch," I wrote the music first because I found a texting program called "Text-Osterone" that simplified the construction of the animation and had great timing and visual effects.

Please understand that "Text-Osterone" wasn't intended to be used as a 2D animation program per se...except for text. If you want to experiment with this software program, be sure to purchase the optional plug-in package that allows conversion to standard video format, because the original version used the "Flash" format as its output. Please verify compatibility with your system before purchase.

The biggest problem I encountered involved making changes to your animation cues. As I stated, this software was never intended to be used for lengthy animated segments. When you wanted to make a change in the animation, you had to playback the program from the very beginning to see if the modification was acceptable -- rather than start somewhere around the point of revision. Considering all the fine tuning that had to be made, this drawback led to considerable delay in constructing what is a comparatively short program. So I'm counting this as a learning curve.

The score is written for brass sextet (2,2,1,1) and percussion, with an optional flute substituting for the piccolo trumpet part. The score, without percussion, can be found here.