Final Major Project: Animated Music Video

Evaluation

This project has, in my opinion, been equal parts fun and stressful. I very much enjoyed looking into this topic, studying it, and then producing my final music video, and here I intend to critically analyse and compare each of the different sections of my process and explain what I did right and wrong, what techniques I used, and how my vision of the project changed over time. In total, this project has come out to nearly 36,000 words (not including my bibliography) and 35 separate subpages organising my entire process. All of that work for one 3-minute-long MP4 file

Successes and Failures

Of course, when analysing the entirety of my final project, a good place to start is to look at what I did right and what I did wrong. This project certainly was ambitious, and of course there were many slip-ups along the way.

Research

I am, overall, very happy with both the quality and quantity of work that I did for my research. My fine art research (aka. colour theory, character design, and animation) was very in-depth, as it was a section I personally already knew a lot about. My technical research (aka. software, parts of my animation, and animation primary research) was not quite as in-depth as I would have liked, but I think it was thorough enough to justify and explain my choices during development. Then, my music video research (both regular and animated) was incredibly in-depth, and while I think I could have expanded a bit more on my general music video styles, techniques, and conventions, I believe that I have shown enough knowledge and research into animated music videos to prove that I can easily do one myself. As for my primary research, this was a criteria that I have been critiqued in the past on due to me not doing as much; however, I think that in this project I managed to include a bit of primary research into almost every topic that I looked into. I originally intended to do a bit of primary research for my animation subpage (i.e., animate something according to the 12 principles), but did not get round to it. If I were to do this project again, I think that I would look a bit more into cartoon techniques and more into the target audience, as these sections were a little lacking, in my opinion.

Development

As for my development, there's not much I can really say about the strengths and weaknesses other than that I think I prepared enough to make my production as good as it can be. I think that I did a fair focus group to choose my song, and took all of the feedback given very seriously. I think that I would have done a more in-depth focus group and analysis, had my peers not also been busy with their final major projects. Other than that, I think the choice of song was well justified and explained. I then went on to discuss the target audience, that being Cavetown fans, which I think I did fairly well but as I mentioned in my weekly log, this was a fairly last-minute addition and so it was not as extensive as I think it could have been. Other than that, my character sheets, script, and storyboards were all relevant and thorough, and used techniques that I learned and skills that I developed in my research section. If I were to do this project again, I would probably go into a bit more detail on some of these subpages as far as writing goes, and perhaps make it more obvious what kinds of techniques I was taking from my research. I think that linking my development and production back to my research is an incredibly important bullet point that I perhaps fell a little short on, and I will try my best to do this better in future projects.

Production

As far as production goes, I think that it was a really mixed bag, and some parts I was very happy with, while others not so much. For example, one point I really felt I could have done better in was my organisation and time management. To put it bluntly, I definitely took my time towards the first few weeks of productions, painstakingly creating and photographing the house for the backgrounds, and I really feel like if I had not focussed as much on that, I would have had more time to animate, and it might have looked a bit better. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my animation's backgrounds because of the time and effort I put into this section of my production, however I sacrificed a lot of time that could have been spent fine-tuning certain parts of the animation.

There were a lot of things that I felt I succeeded at in my production, however, such as the modelling of my 3D character. Not only did this not take a huge amount of time, but it looks awesome and really helped with animating certain parts of the music video. I also love the fact that I got to incorporate different kinds of animation into my project, as it shows a wider berth of knowledge, and proves that I can apply animation theory in multiple different mediums. I definitely stepped outside my comfort zone for this project, however I think it payed off. Overall, if I were to do this again, I think I would have looked more into time management, and tried to make room for all the different parts of my project, and thereby would have been able to make the animation look smoother and more professional due to having more time to spend on it.

Used Techniques

I believe that I researched and applied a wide variety of techniques and skills for this project - techniques in animation, in music video, and in fine art.

Development

Of course a lot of the techniques I used during my development and pre-production I very obviously state having researched, such as storyboarding and character design, however I used a fair amount of techniques that might at first glance go unnoticed. Firstly, when concepting and picking my idea for my song, I used colour theory to brainstorm what kinds of colours, shapes, and characters would fit best with the given song, which is something I mentioned being very important to all music videos under my "Colour Theory in Music" subheading in this subpage. Another example is how I applied the skills I had learned from analysing different music videos in order to script my animation. Of course, this music video uses the narrative convention I discussed in my music video theory subpage, and uses styles such as surrealism and even a bit of pastiche in places. I also take inspiration from all of the animated music videos that I researched, even if it was only subconsciously. Overall, I think that in my development I used a multitude of different relevant techniques, and while I did not directly point out all of them, they were all heavily researched and intended.

Production

I used a huge amount of techniques for my production, of course, however I did not directly point them out nearly as much as I did in my development subpages. For my backgrounds and 3D character, of course, I used blender techniques developed during my software research, which I of course referenced and made clear. However during my animation it might be a lot less obvious what techniques I used - almost all of the 12 principles of animation were utilized at some point (for example, staging was outlined in my storyboards, straight ahead action and pose-to-pose animation were used depending on software and context, and things like anticipation and arcs were used throughout, almost subconsciously). Other techniques I used were editing techniques, which I didn't really research but knew about from older projects, fine art skills such as character appeal, proportions, and emotions, and other things such as referencing and cartoonism. Again, I may not outright say it in my actual subpages, but a lot of techniques went into the production of this music video, and all of my research was utilised at some point in the project.

Visions of the Project

The idea I had for this project has, of course, changed a lot over the course of its research, development, and production. It started out being very very vague, the only idea I had was for it to be animated and include some kind of character design. I wanted it to have a combination of 2D and 3D animation, however I wasn't quite sure how yet.

Once I'd picked my song (which, as I mentioned in my weekly log, was secretly the one I'd wanted to do all along), it became a lot easier to concept and come up with ideas. My initial concept that you can see to the right was very different to how the video ended up looking. I had no idea that I would fall in love with Klause's rat design, and would thereafter make everyone animalistic, an interesting and welcome change. As for the change over the production process, after scripting and storyboarding nothing really changed too much except for a few minor details - for example, I changed the look of the backgrounds a little during their production, Uko lost his hair somewhere during the animation process, and some bits in the intro were added and shuffled for pacing reasons. Other than that, my idea stayed and made it to finalisation.

Feedback

After completing my music video, I showed it to some of my peers in order to get feedback. The responses were quite mixed, and there was a pretty even divide of positive vs negative feedback - let's start with the positives. Most of my peers and tutors liked the music video overall. Some people talked about liking the animation style, my friend Wesley said that he thought it was easy to follow along with, and that it fit well with the lyrics. Drew said that he thought the setting was cohesive with the story, and many people talked about how the colour scheme and animation style fit well with the message and themes of the song and storyline. I also had a lot of compliments around the panoramic section of the first chorus; pretty much everyone agreed it was well animated. A lot of the negative points that were made were about the choppiness of the animation; for example Drew stated that the part in the into interlude where the mother gets pushed by the father looked a little bit off, and that it could have been more natural and smooth. One of my peers also said that at times the storyline was a bit difficult to follow, and that I could have made it clear what was going on. One part of the animation that I got a really mixed bag of responses for was the dream sequence in the interlude - some people really liked the change in style, while other thought it looked very strange and choppy. I think that this sequence is very much down to personal taste, and I actually quite like that. Once piece of feedback I got from my tutor which was very useful was that the captions were potentially quite distracting, and while they can be useful for some, they can actually really take away from the video. He said that a solution to this problem could be to upload my music video to YouTube, where closed captions are optional. In response to this, instead of burning the captions into the mp4 file, I uploaded the raw video to YouTube, exported the captions directly from Premiere Pro, and uploaded them. This took me max ten minutes, and means you have the option to watch the video with or without subtitles. Other than that, all of the feedback I got was personal taste, and either way there is not much I can do. If I were to animate this music video again with this feedback in mind, I would probably focus a bit more on pacing when it comes to my animation, as to make parts look more natural, and flow better to cut out any confusion on what's happening.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse