I just love! love! love! this sublime piano animation. It has charm, it's poetic, the music has been tastefully selected, the activated notes to me look accurate with the music.

a) I'm a sucker for player pianos - but the recordings have to be, as this is, from ye olde days.

b) You may have noticed I love animations with character.

This was done 11 years ago - a long time ago in computer animation terms - but I think it holds up beautifully today. Look out for when the butterfly goes into the piano mechanism.

Mike: you were doing computer animation with Pixar around this time - what do you think of it?

Here's the technical gen from the youtube page:

"Computer animated student film from 1997 featuring procedural animation of an upright piano driven by a MIDI file derived from a player piano roll arranged by Frank Milne in the 1930s.

Based on a concept by Brad Winemiller, it was produced by Kirk Bowers, Mark Fontana and Steve May at The Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD). Additional modeling support (piano harp and strings) was provided by Phil Massimi. Software used was emacs (text editor) for modeling, Steve May's Scheme-based Animation Language ("AL") for animation, GIMP for texture maps, Pixar's RenderMan for rendering, and Side Effects' Houdini for compositing.

An early version of this film was originally created for a procedural animation class taught in 1996 by Rick Parent at Ohio State's CIS (now CSE) department. Additional contributors in that class included Bret McGee and Jeremy Loomis (early butterfly models). "

 

Ahh yes that is very nice. I think it was more a rendering and technical exercise from the creators point of view, using midi and procedural techniques etc. yet they still managed to get some cool artistry in there. Great idea about the water drops triggering the keys and then the surprise ending of it being the fish making it happen.
One of the creators, Kirk Bowers is a friend of mine. We both used to work at Pixar. In fact, I was his wife's Bridesmaid - yes you read that correctly. Her name is Karyn and she was an animator at Pixar also. That's where they met.
Good to see this as I had not seen it before.

I remember you being a bridesmaid - aaah, THAT's who it was! I realised about it being a technical exercise and they'd done posh things with window reflections, etc but I love it as a piece of entertainment. Pass on my exultations to Kirk next time you speak!!