Changing up a video I made a few months ago. The inflating anvil was a fun little thing I did in June, an anvil inflating and floating out of shot.
I made two changes to the initial inflation stage. First, I changed the background to polka dots and second I added a shading change so that the anvil turned from a metal anvil to a plastic balloon.
The easiest way to add the popping was to make another animation using the same background and camera setup, do the break-up and fall as a separate animation and edit the videos together when I added the sound effects.
The initial break-up after the ‘pop’ happens off camera. There’s an add-on available in Blender that lets you break up an object into random chunks. This is great for breaking walls, smashing up objects or popping inflatable anvils.
Using the visual video and sound editor in Blender, it was easy enough to edit the two videos together. Three sound effects were used. Inflating balloon and balloon pop were both from Pixabay. The clattering is from the BBC sound archives – all of the metal falling sounds on Pixabay were too hollow, they sounded like coins or cans and I wanted a heavy metal sound.
What I also had to do – and forgot originally – is reset the aspect ratio to square so that YouTube sees this as a ‘Short’ rather than a full video. Shorts get promoted in the YouTube algorithm in a different way and it’s a lot easier for people to see them. This has the unfortunate side effect that the video looks a bit odd here in the blog.
Grim up North Heath 