Psalm 4:4
wonderful = floating i guess
Know ye also that the Lord hath made his holy one wonderful: the Lord will hear me when I shall cry unto him. (Psalm 4:4 DR)
Originally I had intended to utilize a base image of someone jumping or something like that. I didn’t really find anything that struck me, and then I started to think it might be more interesting to create that sense from an image that wasn’t originally in that state.
I found this image on Unsplash and thought it’d be a great basis. I liked how the hair was kind of floating, which I thought would give a nice sense of movement while still in the state of suspension.
There’s not too much deep meaning embedded in this particular .gif, and I’m never absolutely certain whether the description I give is what I was thinking at the time, is born out of completing the project, or if there’s some sort of mental wormhole between the past and the present that congeals it altogether.
At any rate, I was imagining that God making his holy one wonderful once again highlights the divine action and impetus; on our own we are stuck in the mundane and are generally quite a bit less than wonderful. Thus, for this I wanted to take this kind of mundane photo which was originally of this person on the ground but then modify and recompose it to be a sort of transfiguration of the mundane. Most of the trappings are still there, but there is super-added something of which we are not normally capable.
It is this hope in God’s ability to make his holy one wonderful which forms the basis of his confidence: the Lord will hear me when I shall cry unto him.
There are no doubt also messianic reverberations; holy in the biblical sense is not only purity of heart and action but in its essence is to be set apart. St. Paul in the epistle to the Hebrews quotes the Psalmist about Christ:
Wherefore when he cometh into the world, he saith: Sacrifice and oblation thou wouldest not: but a body thou hast fitted to me: Holocausts for sin did not please thee. Then said I: Behold I come: in the head of the book it is written of me: that I should do thy will, O God. (Hebrews 10:5-7)
Jesus thus is the holy one made wonderful in the highest sense, in that as God he is the one who sets apart and as man is the one set apart as the person of the Word takes upon himself human substance, being fully God and fully man. As the body of Christ we participate in that in a mode that the Psalmist could only prefigure, an antetype fully realized in Christ Jesus.
This one was relatively straightforward to animate. I cutout the figure in Photoshop, then applied the Puppet Tool in After Effects, eventually linking the pins to some Nulls to be animated, and then linking those Nulls and the base figure image to another control Null for global movement.
I added in a nice sky background, and finally some simple boxes to give it a little depth and compositional balance. I added some Y position movement on the boxes, applied a loop(Out) expression to the keyframes, and finally offset the layers on the timeline.
Enjoy.
Know ye also that the Lord hath made his holy one wonderful: the Lord will hear me when I shall cry unto him. (Psalm 4:4 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: