As you might be able to see in my audio subpage, the "intro" to this music video is actually twice as long as the other sections of the song when it comes to overall length. This is because the intro is actually split up into two distinct parts: the vocal introduction, which acts as a short verse, and then a musical interlude. Because of this, I split up my workflow and animated them as two separate parts, only putting them together after the fact.
This section is shown between the lines "Life's alright in Devil Town" and "We're fine, no one's going to catch us now".
This first section of the intro was fairly straightforward: __ distinct frames, all drawn and animated in Photoshop, as you can see to the left. This depicts Klause's drawing and, overall, is a pretty good introduction to the themes that will continue throughout the music video. This section took me around two or three days to finish, simply because I was getting used to the workflow.
This part definitely took the longest, in part because it was a lot longer duration-wise than I initially thought (and so I had to come up with bits on the fly to account for extra time), but also because I had no reference and was trying to smoothly animate from scratch. Unlike the actual interlude, this section was not taken from a 3D video, and so I have to take longer figuring out keyframes and smooth animation, not to mention this section includes a huge amount of complex movements. Eventually, though, after around a week, I managed to finish this section of the animation.
This section of the song requires a lot of fast movement, as you can see in the storyboard frames, and so there's a lot of spinning around characters, interesting perspectives, and smooth transitions. There's a section near the end of this interlude that I am quite proud of, especially when considering it was pretty much improvised. The parents move off to the side, and we zoom into Uko to see their shadows over him as they fight. This section was created by animating the shadows separately, exporting each frame as a transparent .png, and then putting the images as a video sequence over the top of the base animation at low opacity in Adobe Premiere Pro. This gives it the effect you can see in the final clip. I think that the shadows' movement combined with Uko's smooth cartoonish blink makes for a very engaging clip.
Overall, this section of the music video took a very long time to animate, but I am very happy with how it came out.