Soda trip - animatic

For a final year project, I am going to do a 2 minute 3d animation that will serve as a music video for a song by "The Junior Panthers".

The Junior Panthers is an indie rock band that I heard one night while listening to Indie Pop Rocks.

One year ago a strange impulse made me write an email to Edwin - to ask if I can use one of their tracks and make a video.

He responded incredibly well to my enthusiasm and sent me the band's CDs and a T-shirt  (hey hey free stuff!! :D).

Now that made me very happy. However the day in which I received the JP goodies in my mail, the call from Disney Interactive Studios happened.
So the music video was put on hold for a year.

Here is a funny thing about that placement. A big part of the work there was just that- putting together videos, based on the music in them.
Had I not taken that internship, I would have probably done this in a different, less good way.

And today...

The university had me pitch it to them:
ppt@googledocs

Does starting with the music track introduce new challenges for the editor?
Well, it depends...
If the music is picked right, it can do half the job for you.
It will set the structure of your story. The rhythm will set the pacing of the shots.
Music's sound gives a sense of the mood and visuals -  the lyrics inspire abstract ideas.

So listening to the track over and over again and outlining its structure, I timed it in my mind and wrote down what would happen in each section.

Robert Mckee has a great book , which helped  a lot with getting a better understanding of how story writing works. It's not about forcing you to be formulaic.It's more in the sense of giving you the right type of questions to ask yourself when you write.

 For example I started with this:

Then moving on to the animatic:

I used a combination of Kdenlive and Mypaint  this time around.

Kdenlive used to be quite unstable. But version 0.9.2 didn't crash once after hours of work.

The animatic took about 4-5 hours to make.
Some of the drawings are reused in multiple shots- retaining the framing of the camera, but moving the character around. That saved a lot of time too.

Soda trip - animatic from todor imreorov on Vimeo.

Concept art:
When designing the character, it's good to think about what you want to communicate with that to the audience. Who is that character and what are they all about? Does the character drive the plot, or is that character being driven by the plot?
How does the character fit with the rest of the style and what does that style say about the film?

I started with this basic sketch, which I am going to refine later on.

Anyway more on the character models and concept art in the next update!! :)