Something that has always interested me growing up are online fan music videos, more commonly known as "animatics". These are animations published online in a non-professional manner by often non-professional animators who are fans of a show, movie, or book. These are often found on YouTube, mostly in the form of scruffy, sketched storyboard-esc animations, as it is difficult to complete a full professional animation in your spare time with little to no professional resources. Because of this, they are a very good model for what animators can achieve with enough passion and skill, and I will look into some of these fan animations and discuss the skills they require to make them and how I can take inspiration from them in order to create my own animated music video.
There are generally two different types of fan animatics: solo animatics, where an animator will create an entire video on their own, and what's known as "MAPs, or multi-animator projects. I will go into the latter in a bit, as they are a little separated from my production process, but I still think it's important to look into them. Here I will look at two animations done completely by an individual.
This animatic was done by animator Szin on YouTube, who has done a multitude of different animatics for a lot of different fandoms, mostly musical theatre fandoms such as Heathers, Dear Evan Hansen, Be More Chill, and of course Hamilton. This animation is of the song "Non-Stop" from the Broadway musical Hamilton and took the artist around 10 days total to complete, which is an impressive feat for a 6:33-minute video. This YouTuber has many videos talking about their animation process; the software they use is SAI Paint and Sony Vegas Pro (which is very similar to Adobe Premiere Pro in interface and functionality), and other than for backgrounds and overlays, their animatics tend to be grayscale and quite sketchy.
This animator utilises many different editing techniques and styles in their videos, such as zooming, blurs, and panoramas. They explain how they easily accomplish this in their video "How I Make My Animatics" (as referenced in my bibliography), and it's mostly a combination of pre-set effects in their editing software and additional frames that flash on screen only for brief periods of time.
This animatic in particular, along with their animatic for the song "Satisfied", is very popular, getting a combined 39 million views. They have done a total of 25 Hamilton animatics over the course of 2 years; however, this animatic is, in my opinion, one of the best. They play around with angles, expressions, colours, and effects to great effect, and I will definitely be using some of their strategies to create my own animated music video.
This animator, "Beat Rice" on YouTube, animated the song "What Is This Feeling" from the Broadway musical Wicked in 2022. The video description and channel description give no indication as to how long the video took or what software they used to complete it; however, you can see that the overall quality of the animation is much higher than the previously stated animatic. This is most likely because the animation was done for the animator's schoolwork, as stated in the video's description, as presumably it went through a few different trials and sketch layers before ending up in this final work. It is also not the entirety of the song, and the animation itself is only 2:06 in length.
I very much like the art style of this animation, as it is more akin to a Disney movie or professional cartoon, and you can really tell that while the animation has the same overall vibes as an unprofessional animatic, it is a lot cleaner and better put together. This is more like the kind of standard I hope to achieve with my animation, as I have given myself a good amount of time to be able to reach this quality of animation.
While not totally relevant to my production process, I would like to take a bit of time to talk about some of the best animated MAPs out there. This is a project where a group of animators, all with different art styles, get together to animate a song or audio. This means that each animator might only be doing one or two 10-second long segments, giving the animation a much cleaner look and allowing for more effort in regards to colour, lip-syncing, and backgrounds. Here are some of my favourites.
This MAP, organised, edited, and published by YouTuber Hita Eighthsun, is an animation to the song "Ready As I'll Ever Be" from the show Tangled: Before Ever After. It was animated by 22 different animators in early 2018, and the entire animation took a few months to animate and edit.
There are a few key differences between this MAP and the previously discussed animatics; for one, this animation is fully coloured, and there is complete lip syncing in almost all shots, so it looks very professional. There is, of course, the drawback that it looks a little inconsistent given that each section is animated in a different style.