For Money: Truth and Lies I wanted to try and express the slippery "truth" of current currency in a video meant as a sort of animated triptych, showing 3 perspectives on the measure of wealth. These 3 perspectives are crypto, fiat, and religion. The linear order of the video skewed the presenting of the perspectives though, possibly leading the viewer to believe that the piece is presenting religion is the ultimate truth because of the last quote in the video being the religious (Christian) perspective: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.” 1 Timothy 6:10. The beginning and end clips are duplicates, with the end simply being in reverse, meant to "summarize" the piece with the symbolism of the bank and cross becoming like a church, and the shattered bank leading into bitcoin imagery, with the core of bitcoin being decentralization.
This was my first time using After Effects. I had previously used Premiere Pro once to make a mashup video in Digital Art 1, and rendered directly from Photoshop to make an animated video final in Studio Art 2. I managed to make most of the video in nearly 20 hours straight without sleeping, and it shows-- the video feels a bit cobbled together in places. I made the audio track first in Audacity, taking music and clips and splicing them together, before piecing together animations and video to go along with it.
Pink Floyd's Money had what I thought was the perfect intro background music, which I cut and looped a few times in the video. I also used Toby Ganger's Welcome to The Blockchain (The Bitcoin Song) since the content was fitting for the concept I was going for, even though the music styles clashed. If I had more time/energy, I would go back and try to blend it better or find some other sound bite for the crypto perspective.
I used and cut a lot of video clips, including a fanmade music video for Welcome to The Blockchain (The Bitcoin Song), Bitcoin news videos, Gospel animation, and two screen recordings of my own. I used existing images from the web to add animations and ended up with more than a few nested compositions in After Effects. Using existing content was definitely faster than when I did the animated final which consisted of material purely made by myself. This was an example of what was used for the intro/ending:
