Pre Production

creating characters

Creating the characters wasn't too difficult . I wanted them to have a simple design. I used a mirror tool which helped keep everything symmetrical and the same proportions.

RESEARCH

I want the Producer Man character to come across as an amalgamation of the Monopoly man (named Uncle Pennybags) and the Pringles man, a sort of ‘happy go lucky’ character who is clearly good with money. He needs to be wearing a suit to give the impression of a business man, but he can have the cartoony nature of Disney/Pixar. As the song lyrics progress I want some of the scenes to reflect his exploitive nature and his money grabbing tendencies. I like the idea of the floating head being surrounded by falling money. Some of the images in my mind are combinations of the Trump and Boris balloons, as well as the 7 rings emoji music video from Arianna Grande.

I want the girl character to begin with being very simple and inspired by the gang beasts/ human fallflat kind of vibe. She is almost inhuman, puppet like, which is perhaps how he sees her rather than her actually being insignificant. As the music video progresses, she becomes more human looking, almost girl like as she sees the mistake she has made in signing the deal with him. She is trapped, like a caged animal. As this realisation progresses, she becomes an inhuman puppet again, as she is just another ‘means to an end’ for Producer Man.

He is very much the main character in this video, so I don’t want her image to detract from this.

Inspiration for creating the scenes has come from a variety of places. I really enjoyed watching the series The Flight Attendant and particularly the opening animation with the credits designed and created by Taka Ikari. I love how the scenes change and split and I’m going use the mirror imaging effects in particular, in the music video. Some of the animation sequences are repeated in the screenplay, whereby you have split screens showing different scenes happening simultaneously.

Taka Ikari is a Senior Motion Graphics Designer at Warner Bros, based in Burbank, California. He has created a number of animated title sequences, such as DC’s ‘legends of Tomorrow’ and ‘The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’. My favourite sequence is the Flight Attendant.

There are so many animated music videos out there. Here are a couple that I think are pretty good and have inspired my work.

Taylor Swift Look what you made me do (lyric video)

This animation was created by ODD

Office of Development and Design is a design and animation company based in both New York and Los Angeles. It is headed up by the creative genius Gary Breslin. The team have the ability to be experimental in their creative outcomes due to the phenomenal success of previous projects such as The Dissident, Stars and Strife, Look what you made me do and Icarus, for which they won an Academy Award.

Tame Impala

Feels like we only go backwards

This was created by Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling. This duo have been creating stop motion animations for years and have a large portfolio of diverse clients, such as Cartoon network (Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared series) and St John Ambulance.