The Making of ‘Marine Dreamin Pop Star’ Music Video

used a program called Vocaloid to make the animated characters sing. This programme was created around 2003 and used by Mike Oldfield.

The programme  allowed me manipulate recordings of a real singer to sing whatever and however I wanted. The girl on the left is called Miku and the girl on the right is called Rin (who is one of a pair with a twin voice called Len). A singer records the sounds needed for the language separately for around 1-10 seconds.

This is then used for a pronunciation code to enter lyrics. Underneath the code and notes are many settings, (around 70 in total) that are changed constantly to make the characters sing. It  can take anywhere from 20 to 100+ hours to make a song. The animation is very similar to stop motion.

Each movement is registered for every frame. I registered Rin’s movement for every frame (her bones, some muscles, her face) and then I flipped her movement for Miku and created the movements for Miku’s  face and hands. I made some changes to Miku’s bone structure so that she moved differently.

by Emily Kelly