#i wanted to redraw a shot from a music video tonight

[vegeta897]

I have finally completed the animation I started 9 months ago. It’s about my friend being stranded in the woods. It’s almost based on a true story and the audio comes from actual videos of his ordeal.

Notice I said “started 9 months ago ” and not “worked on for 9 months.” There were long periods of inactivity. But I did know the whole time that I would finish it eventually. Unlike many projects of mine! I am very excited to premier this to my friends (and some family!) tonight and feeling very fulfilled.

It started with my friend Milly (Mills) posting several short videos he recorded while waiting for a towtruck to pick him up when he got his motorcycle stuck in the mud.

Something about the videos and his monologue made me want to create an animation based on them. So I cut and stitched various parts together in Renoise, and came up with the whole audio track.

The principle of my workflow is to get the entire audio track, including music, finalized before ever picking up my pen. Timing and pacing scenes by audio only is a good way to get it right, I think. If I can make something that flows just by listening to it, it’s a good bet the final animation will flow too.

With the audio track exported, my first step was storyboarding. A quick sketch for every scene or cut, sometimes with arrows or rudimentary animation to illustrate the intent. It’s during this storyboarding that most of the ideas were established. I really enjoy how I have to be creative to come up with visuals to match an audio track that was created without much regard for what it would all look like.

Here’s a rendering of the animation with the storyboards overlaid on top:

Holy heck are there a lot of cuts in this animation. It feels like a shot is rarely held for more than 5 seconds. I could go and count exactly how many shots there are but I’m lazy.

So I had the storyboard and audio track for an animation that weighed in at about 4.5 minutes, spanning almost 4000 frames. My New Years animation was longer, but that was barely animated. This was definitely going to be up there in terms of work required.

My next step was drawing in very angular outlines for the backgrounds. The triangular/polygonal style in the final product didn’t come until much later. I really didn’t know what I wanted the backgrounds to look like, and this loomed over me for almost the entire time I spent doing everything else.

I was itching to get down to the raw animation work, so I began taking on scene after scene of character animation.

The flat-color-with-no-outlines style was a choice I made quickly when I considered how much extra work it would be to give it my usual treatment. It was also refreshing to try something new.

The animation is 15 frames per second, but many parts were done at 1/2 or 1/3 rate (twos and threes, in animation lingo). Sometimes the decision came down to how "in the mood” I was to animate at the time.

Guides are important. A lot of scenes were free-handed though. When you draw a character enough times you get pretty good at it.

When I crack open a Rockstar, you know it’s time for some serious animating. 

With most of the character art done, I moved on to the motorcycle. Oh, that friggin’ bike. A Benelli TnT135. Even after studying literally dozens of photos and videos of it, it’s still a tricky 3D shape to grasp at some angles, particularly the tail end of the seat.

And then I had to animate it in that penultimate shot of our hero driving away. I shamelessly took as many shortcuts as I could to avoid as much redrawing as possible. The end result is okay. I hope the significance of what the bike is doing means the viewer isn’t focused on how realistic it looks.

At last I had to face the backgrounds. My first attempts failed miserably.

So, Adobe Animate does not really have great tools for coloring (by hand, anyway). Trying and failing to come up with a workable style was discouraging. Forests have a lot of variety in texture, all around. There’s all kinds of colors and shapes. How could I convey all that?

Go abstract. 

No, Adobe Animate does not have some cool 3D mesh feature or fractal generator. These triangles were drawn line by line, fill by fill. That includes the animated water.

I managed to re-use some backgrounds in many of the simpler shots, but some locations, like the bike and road, had angles too varied to copy and paste.

I had determination, though, because working on these backgrounds was part of the final stretch of getting this thing done. I could see the finish line.

When the backgrounds were done, I made pretty quick work of drawing and animating the various props. Basically anything that wasn’t the character or bike, like the log, the can, the foil cup, and so on.

The last few days were spent creating the title and credits, as well as polishing stuff like the color correction used to illustrate times of day. Yesterday I sent a preview of the whole video to my good friend Viper, whose critical yet supportive feedback I value the most. I must say, his generally positive response helped me sleep that night. The night before, I was tossing and turning, stuck in a mind loop of drawing triangles in my imagination. That is not a joke.

Thanks for reading! After keeping this mostly-secret for so long, it’s nice to get it all out there.

#animation