I have talked in past projects about my relationship with drawing backgrounds; needless to say, I am not very good at them. I thought that a good solution to this would be to create the environments in which my characters will be in Blender and then use them as a reference for any and all backgrounds I need to create.
When creating my storyboards, I had a vague idea of what each of the different rooms would look like, and the main characters' bedroom is definitely the most prominent in my mind. A desk for Klause to draw at, a window on the far side of the room, and a bunk bed for the two siblings to sleep in.
I started by creating a basic room with a window (using a Boolean modifier to create a gap) and downloaded the Blender addon "BlenderKit". This is a library full of pre-made assets, which will be very useful for this room. There were no pre-made bunk bed assets, though, and so I started off by creating this bed. I don't care very much about mathematical accuracy or smoothing it out, as this will simply be a reference for me to draw from. I managed to find pre-made assets for a door, a wardrobe, and later a desk and a stool (though I started with a basic mesh made by me before switching to a pre-made asset).
Afterwards, I attached a room to the side of this to act as the hallway, as seen in pages 1 and 2 of my storyboards. I would later add a staircase and bannisters and also shuffle around where the doors are.
The living room is where the entirity of the first verse takes place, and so it is important to make sure I get it accurate. I know from my storyboards that it needs to contain a dining table, couch, TV, and front door all in one space, as I will need to pan around it quite a lot and have characters move from one area to another in several shots. I almost entirely used pre-made assets, however I found that this made the polycount for this room enormous, and caused it to lag out and crash a few times during its creation. I managed to get it working smoothly in the end, and even managed to create an area light that acted as the TV screen.
The final piece of the house is the outside. This was the bit that I was least looking forward to, since I made it so that there's a forest directly outside the characters' house, meaning that I would have to somehow model a low-poly forest that's big enough to look realistic.
I began with the front door and pavement. I made a lawn, a path going straight up to the front door, and a road on the other side. I would also duplicate this lawn and create it several more times to create the illusion of a neighbourhood. I added both the window looking out from the bedroom and also the window looking into the living room (though that would somewhat come when I combine all of the rooms into one).
Finally, I found a low-poly tree mesh on BlenderKit and then used a tutorial I found on YouTube (as referenced in my bibliography) to create my forest. I made some bumpy landscapes with the A.N.T. landscape addon and then used a particle effect to place my trees on them. I edited the size, quantity, and randomness until I got a forest that was as dense and big as I required.
After creating each of my rooms, I realised that for some shots it would be advantageous for me to pan between rooms, and so I created a blender file with all of the different rooms put together. This is where I also added texture and lights; unfortunately, all of this, plus the fact that my pre-made assets weren't exactly light on the polys, resulted in a very laggy file that crashed several times. Luckily, nothing was lost or corrupted, and so I was able to begin shooting my frames.
Shown below (under the subheading "Frames Needed") is a list of all the frames I would need to shoot, in order of their appearance in the animation. I went through all of my storyboards, evaluated which frames I would need, and gave them each a name and brief description. Then, in Blender, I set up a camera and got the shots I needed. For the "pan" shots, I used Blender's animation timeline and exported each frame as a PNG. Below are some examples of these completed frames.
1. Room 1 - Front on desk
2. Desk 1 - Slanted view of desk
3. Room 2 - Camera facing towards door
4. Desk 2 - Birds eye view of desk
5. Hallway 1 - View into hallway from room
6. Hallway 2 - View into room from hallway
7. Room 3 - Into room from doorway
8. Room 4 - View of behind the bed
9. Table 1 - Front on view of the table
10. Table 2 - Klause's seat
11. Table 3 - Uko's seat
12. Couch 1 - Front on view of the couch
13. Couch 2 - View towards the door from couch
14. Room 5 - View towards the window
15. Window 1 - Close up in the window from outside
16. Window Pan - Pan from the window to the ground
17. Garden 1 - View of the front of the house from the ground
18. Road 1 - View of the pavement from the house
19. Wall 1 - Close up of the wall
20. Bed 1 - Close up of Klause's bed
21. Bed 2 - Even closer up of Klause's bed
22. Living Room 1 - View of the living room from the door
23. Floor 1 - View of the floor near the front door
24. Room 6 - View of the top bunk from the room
25. Room 7 - View from the top bunk
26. Room 8 - View of the room from above (Uko's perspective)
27. Room 9 - Close up of the top bunk
28. Bed 3 - View of bottom bunk from end of the bed
29. Bed 4 - View of door from bottom bunk
30. Bed pan - Pan up to top bunk
31. Bed 5 - View of top bunk
32. Bed 6 - View of bed from side
33. Door 1 - View of door from inside room
34. Door 2 - View of door from outside room
35. Bed 7 - Close up of bottom bunk from end of bed
36. Window 2 - Angled view of outside the window
37. Garden 2 - Angled view of window from garden
38. Window 3 - Side-on view of window
39. Room 10 - Low down view of bottom bunk
40. Front Door 1 - Side-on view of the front door
41. Front Door 2 - close up view of side of front door
42. Front door 3 - Front on view of front door
43. Outdoors 1 - Side on view of pavement and forest
44. Outdoors 2 - Close up of inside forest
45. Outdoors 3 - Angled view of forest floor
46. Outdoors 4 - Angled view of forest canopy
47. Outdoors 5 - Wide shot of forest
48. Outdoors 6 - Close up of forest floor
Of course, I didn't want to just have raw Blender photos as my backgrounds; that would look strange and choppy. Instead, I opted for a Studio Ghibli (but gone dark) aesthetic and painted the backgrounds, with 2D characters over the top. There are two different techniques that I used in order to try and make my final backgrounds stylized, with the second one being the one I eventually went for.
My first assumption was that I would actually physically paint each of my backgrounds in Photoshop. I downloaded some brushes, Jeremy Fenske's concept brushes (as referenced in my bibliography), and colour picked directly from the backgrounds after I decreased the saturation on them to make them look spookier and fit in more with the grayscale characters. I left a little bit of saturation in there so as not to make them look like old photographs. Painting these was tedious, and it took me a day and a half just to paint these three, and I wasn't even that happy with how they looked. After painting the three you see below, I decided to call it quits and began looking into ways to get this look without taking up weeks of my time.
After giving up on trying to actually paint my backgrounds, I decided to use the cheat method of using Photoshop filters in order to make the picture look like it's painted. I used a tutorial I found online (as referenced in my bibliography), which utilised two different filters - the angled strokes filter, which makes the image look as if it was painted with long brush strokes, and the paint daubs filter, which gives it a globby, mixed look. This, combines with a lowering of the saturation, makes the backgrounds look as if they were hand painted, which was exactly the look I was going for. I finished up by naming each of the frames and giving them numbers in order of appearance in the music video, making them much easier to find and use.