3D Animation Meets 2D in this Amazingly Colorful Music Video

I'm not sure how many people are familiar with Animal Collective, but their music is awesome and they usually have some great videos that go along with their more catchy songs. "Floridada" just came out and it's exactly what anyone would want out of a music video. Weird patterned 3D people having a baby by doing yoga? Check. Epilepsy warning? Check. Amazingly smooth and fun painted 2D animation? Double check.

Who says 2D animation can't marry 3D animation? It just did. In this music video. So enjoy! Get up and dance! And don't forget about that epilepsy warning there are some seriously bright flashing colors in this.

Her Morning Elegance

Stop motion is one of the most time consuming animations to make but the visual result is worth the effort. Stop motion has been used in music videos before, most noteably on MTV, this one in particular worth sharing. "Her Morning Elegance" by Oren Lavie and produced by Michal Dayan took over six weeks to script and storyboard and then 48 hours to shoot all the pictures. I have, along with the orignal video, shared the "making of HME". Enjoy.

A$AP Rocky - JD

I thought this video was really interesting in its switching between animation and live footage seamlessly throughout its entirety. The animation gives the video another dimension of interest straying away from the usual techniques we see in rap music videos. If they were drawing this out frame by frame you can only imagine how long that took them. Definitely worth a watch if you're interested at all in music videos and animation.

Rotoscoping with Breakbot

One of my favorite music videos is Breakbot's "Baby I'm Yours". The shimmering colors and shifting shapes are hypnotic and go along with the music so perfectly. For my next project I'm working on a mini music video that uses this technique, although mine will be a lot less cool than this. I think it's interesting when artists use other mediums for rotoscoping like watercolor or gouache.

Breakbot generally has really cool animated music videos so if you like this one, I'd definitely recommend looking at their other ones.


Breakbot - Baby I'm Yours (feat. Irfane) - HD from Ed Banger Records on Vimeo.

a-ha - Take On Me (Official Video)

The famous 1985's hit, Take on Me by the a-ha's music video received several awards for the creative animation that was portrayed throughout it. In the video, we see a young waitress reading a comic-like book story which eventually comes to life. The music video, being during the 80's, was seen as extremely creative and impressive dealing with animation sketches going back and forth between the real life versions, it's extremely remarkable. I remember watching this music video when I was younger and being really intrigued with how they were able to create this. To this day I still think its incredible the creativity of this music video, it's so simple and yet extremely difficult.

My internship last spring was with a music promotion company and Rose Betts was one of the artist that we worked with. I worked and promoted the launch of her new EP, where they did a first sneak-peak of this video of her stand out song. She was describing the amount of time she poured in this doing stop motion and thought to myself different ways she could use the after effects program to her advantage in this situation.

Its strange to think about the different perspective I've had watching this from a year ago to now. I hope to maybe do a project to a song of maybe a poem instead of a typical title sequence. I have learned this week how important movement and audio are when working together. I want to learn more and work with audio more to express visually the feeling the song or sound is conveying.

A$AP Rocky - JD Music Video

About 8 months after the release of his May 2015 album At.Long.Last.A$AP, rapper A$AP Rocky recently released the music video to his song "JD". I watched this video when it first came out last week and was captivated by the way that the animation it used was blended with real video footage. It was a style that I haven’t seen very much at all before (although I’m sure it has been done), and I really enjoyed it. This is something that I would like to eventually learn how to do, and it could possibly the topic of one of my future animations of the week. I like the style of the flickering paintbrush strokes that the animation was drawn in, and I found it a lot more engaging than just plain old video. My favorite part of the video however came at about 0:48. The beat drops and makes three distinct thumping sounds, which the video parallels by switching back and forth from animation to video in time with each thump. It matched excellently. and I immediately was drawn in even more for the remainder of the video. Videos like JD are part of what initially got me interested in motion graphics - it’s a way to make the work I’m already doing look significantly more visually appealing. This video was very well done, and I’m definitely going to look into tutorials on the paintbrush animation style that it used.