Do Ya Thang - Gorillaz

The Gorillaz is arguably one of the best bands to have ever graced my ears since birth. But aside form their music, they are a prime example of transmedia. What started out as a British rock band has transcended into comics, online games, and interactive holographic concerts! But what I want to talk about today is their Style-o (Stylo is one of their popular songs... This is a joke). Many times you'll find a blend of 2D and 3D animation, and practical effects in their music videos which always helps to blend the creepy, disgusting, and fantastical world of Gorillaz. "Do Ya Thang" was a collaboration between them and Andre 3000, to help promote Converse.

The video below is a making of the very same music video. Here you will see snippets of the production process. Everything from the storyboard, dressing the set, blocking the actors, and eventually modeling the band mates. It's interesting to see how paper comes to life not just through a green suit but the detail they put into designing even the skin of all the characters.

Writing on the Wall: Music Video

So my first Motion Graphics blog post goes out to this amazing music video by the band "Ok Go" The song is titled "Writing on the Wall."

This music video does an absolutely amazing job of organically using camera angles, and video illusions with literal in motion graphics to bend the mind. The ending does an amazing job of showing just how difficult of a production it was, and how many people were involved.

The ending also alludes to the fact that this entire video was created in one take which just adds to the insanity that is this music video. This is probably about as close to a Rube Goldberg music video as you'll ever see.

This video just shows that perspective can be everything and that some of the preproduction and setup would be insane. I can't even imagine what the storyboarding for this music video would look like, because my brain is still fried from just trying to keep up with the actually video.

Definitely worth a watch for sure!

- Kenny Chapman

Pre-Production AFTER Production?

Something that has been stressed upon my introduction to After Effects is the importance of planning. Trying to create a project that you haven’t actually planned out proves especially frustrating when it comes to animation. I’ll elaborate. Anyone can take a camera out and shoot some footage of whatever happens to be convenient. In this case, let’s say you shot 2 minutes of a man sleeping on the bus. While editing your footage, you realize that a shot of a bus driver would really tie everything together. So, the next day, you film the bus driver, insert pieces of the clip throughout your sleeping man footage, throw on a black and white filter and Viola! You’ve successfully created an incredibly deep cinema film in less than 48 hours. 

Now let’s imagine you’re an animator. First of all, recreating the shot of the sleeping man through animation would take even the best animators hours upon hours to recreate— regardless of whether they use digital tools or not. Oh, now you want to add a shot of a bus driver? Ok, that means spending hours upon hours recreating THAT scene, hours upon hours repositioning the original animation to allow room for the new animation, a couple dozen hours trying to figure out why your sleeping man keeps flipping upside-down 5 frames in and— oops. Looks like you not only missed your project deadline, but also the birth of your firstborn son and 3 Super Bowls. 

In short, preproduction is an essential element of animation.

One of the most common documents associated with animation is the storyboard. Traditionally, filmmakers/animators create a storyboard before they move on to the actual shooting/animating. 

Here are some examples of storyboards from some of the most famous scenes in movie history:

No Country for Old Men directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen:

Psycho directed by Alfred Hitchcock: 

The Sound of Music directed by Robert Wise:

In all of the above examples, the storyboard acted as the blueprint for each scene. However, I recently stumbled upon an animated film that strayed from the traditional production timeline. Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary film depicting Folman’s experience as a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War. Often times when it comes to documentaries storyboarding is left out completely. This of course makes sense considering the uncertain/candid nature of the genre. Still, Waltz with Bashir is not just a documentary, it’s an animated documentary. Therefore, the 90 minute movie was filmed in a sound studio and then transferred to a storyboard. I’m sure that the unconventional production timeline  of Waltz with Bashir is the real reason the film was banned in Lebanon. 

Alright, I’m going to be honest— all of that “storyboard” talk was really just a way for me to gracefully (hah) transition into talking about how Waltz with Bashir was animated. Many people initially assume that the movie was made through rotoscoping, or the animation style that uses drawings over live footage to create realistic animation. These people are wrong. “Waltz with Bashir” is actually a combination of Adobe Flash cutouts and classic animation. Each drawing was sliced into hundreds of pieces which were moved in relation to one another, thus creating the illusion of movement. This technique is a unique style invented by Yoni Goodman at the Bridgit Folman Film Gang studio in Israel.