Final Major Project: Animated Music Video

Primary Research

In the past, I have made many animated music videos, all of which have helped me to develop not only illustration and animation skills but also knowledge of the workflow and different methods for creating an attractive-looking animated music video. Here, I will take some of the more notable animations I have done and talk about how they have been useful to me and what I would do to improve them.

Isn't It Love

This animation marks not only my first ever fan animatic but also the first animated video I ever finished completely. It is an animation to the song "Isn't It Love" from Steven Universe: The Movie as a fan animation to my own ongoing Sander Sides fanfiction at the time. Needless to say, the origin is complicated, and the animation is not particularly good; however, I think it is worth mentioning.

This animation was, of course, done in FlipaClip, a well-known free animation app for mobile, which is part of the reason the drawings look so messy—I was doing them with my finger on my small phone screen. I used makeshift zooms, pans, and other effects with my limited software. The entire animation is in grayscale, and mostly it is not lip-synced; however, there is a portion of it where I attempted to lip-sync. The animation generally switched between a drawing-to-drawing storyboard format and a smooth animated format, and while of course my illustration needed some work, the smooth animated sections I think are actually alright.

Lower Your Expectations

This is an animation that I have made twice in my life—once in May 2021 and again in May 2022. It is a fan animation of a portion of the song "Lower Your Expectations" by Bo Burnham, using Thomas Sanders' original characters from the YouTube series Sanders Sides. The first one was made using, again, FlipaClip, and the second was made using OpenToonz. They are both fully coloured, fully lip-synced 2D animations that contain a certain amount of blur and interesting transitions. Needless to say, I improved over a year; however, both animations helped to develop my skills in lip-syncing and, of course, smoother animation as a pose for storyboarding.

Qwerty Finger

This animation, done in December 2022, is my most recent and probably the most relevant animation in regards to my project. It is a simple animation done to a portion of the song "Qwerty Finger" by the band Everything Everything, using some of my own original characters. It was initially animated in Blender and then transferred into OpenToonz and used as a reference for a 2D animation there. This animation took me maybe four days total to complete, and while it is nowhere near professional standard (both the 3D and 2D animations are very scruffy and unpolished), I think that it was a good example of how this tactic can be used to great avail.

I have struggled in the past with animations that involve a lot of fast-paced fluid action, as I find that these types of animation are better suited to straight-ahead animation rather than pose-to-pose (more info on this terminology in my animation subpage). However, when animating from one frame to the next instead of using broad keyframes, it is easy for your character to stretch out of proportion and change size or position on the screen. This is fine for simple, sketchy animations (such as the one I showed in my software subpage under the "animation primary research" subheading), but for professional animations or ones that require animating an entire body, it is a little impractical. This is how I came up with the solution of using a rigged character in Blender as a reference and then sketching over top in OpenToonz. This character that you can see I used in Blender is a model named Snow, who I found free to download on Blender's official website; the model itself didn't really matter as long as it was fully rigged and generally humanoid-shaped. I then animated this set of running cycles, intending to switch between the different characters and show their different movements as individuals. Of course, it is very rough, but that is okay since it's a reference. Then I drew over it in OpenToonz and arrived at this final result. This is, as I have mentioned previously, what I hope to do in my final animation for parts of it. I think that this technique has real potential, and I hope to use it in the future to obtain more coherent results than if I were to animate freehand.

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