Here's a clip of the animatic I'm currently working on now. It's probably best viewed full screen or watch on YouTube instead of the small screen below.
The reason it has no sound is because I don't want to reveal what the song is yet until the very end when it's all complete. I know it looks a little weird without it, but I wanna keep it a surprise.
The song is from one of my all time favorite bands. It's of course copyrighted material and I DO NOT plan to distribute it for any financial purposes without the band's and company's consent. I'm basically doing this just for fun and it'll be a fan-made type of thing, something that I hope everyone will enjoy :)
The way I started all of this was sort of done in a quick (but not too quick) sort of way, but also controlled. The song is almost 1m and 30s long and the the animation will be done frame by frame. That basically means it's a lot do even though it might not seem like it's that much. I'm also doing this all by myself unless I want to find some help later on. After all, this is a challenge.
Anyway, the first intention I had was to start doing some really basic and really rough storyboards while at the same time make the animatic. Here I didn't want the animatic to just have stiff drawings floating around that went along with the fast and upbeat music. I had to at least make them jump to the beat so that I could have more the feeling of the music and each beat for when I would time the animation. Trying to match each drawing with each beat was pretty hard to do because the song has no strict mechanical beats, and the beats go by pretty fast too. So I had to do the best I could to match the drawings with each beat. I have, though, found that the song has different patterns of beats in different sections of the song that I could at least try to work with for when I matched the drawings to the beats. This all worked out great because this will make it more easy for me for when I start to work more on the timing and animation.
I have to add that I didn't do the storyboards all willy-nilly and fast-paced. I have envisioned the music video many times in my head and felt confident enough to know exactly what to draw for the storyboards. Also, the way I worked out the storyboards was also like working out the layouts for the animation, but at their very, very rough stage. Some I think I will probably use for when I start animating.
So basically everything you see in the video up top is a combination of the storyboards, rough layouts, the animatic with some really basic and rough timing. That's kinda the great thing about doing it all in the computer. It saves up so much time like this instead of doing it all seperately, and I'm doing this all in my own way. But I still have sooooo much to do. I'll put up the animatic when it's all complete. I still have to add him lip syncing to the song (hence why you see him with his mouth open all the time) and work on the areas where he walks.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this small look into the process of how I'm doing this music video! Another update will be posted next Saturday. I hope to start working on final layouts, keys and hopefully animation for next week. I think I'll put up the final animatic next coming Saturday without sound, so you can see how it all came out.
