Stuck in an Emo Band (behind the scenes)/Transcript


 * Rebecca Parham: Hi guys, I am Rebecca Parham and I am your host and animator for this behind-the-scenes look at stuck in an emo band. Now if you don't know what I'm talking about, just click this link right here. Go watch the music video and then come right back. So all throughout my senior year of animation school, Dane and I were talking via emails and Twitter but the moment I graduate, he throws a song at me and says: "Hey, you should animate this!". Or however, he talks well what else do you gonna say to that? Except "Yeah, yeah. Let's do it!". So, first day, I just listened to the song. I had it on repeat on my iPhone and I was just trying to visualize what was going on within the story, and big surprise, Dane had written in some pretty interesting visuals like butts crocheting and pterodactyls and the good artists will take advantage of those visual cues. So after tossing the song around in my head for a while, I began drawing out story thumbnails and what these do is they basically act like the blueprint to the entire film. I can figure out cinematography visual gags, the pacing and just see if the ideas in my head are working on paper. While working on the thumbnails, I was also thinking about character design. I had drawn Dane many times before, and I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted him to look like. Also, Dane really liked the way I drew him, so he specifically requested my normal style. So, the challenge was creating a costar that looked very different from Dane, but still looked like he fit in the same world. After a little experimenting, I finally settled on a character design that had a much edgier, sharper, look a less saturated color scheme in a different way of moving. If you can tell, I used a slightly more exaggerated style of animation for the emo singer while Dane was a little more realistic and subdued by comparison. Dane also needed to stick out from his environment because the entire point of the song was that he didn't fit in a simple way of doing that is with color. The main color scheme for the stage and all the emo characters was basically many different shades of blue, and if you noticed, Dane is wearing an orange shirt because orange is blues complement. The two colors just really pop when they're put next to each other, and give an overall more appealing look. Also the orange shirt was kind of a small nod to Dane's bread and butter, so now that the designs and the characters and the thumbnails are all figured out, it's time to start making the day thing. This came in five basic stages: layout, animation, ink and paint, finalization, and editing. Layout is where you rough in the entire film and figure out that you made a buttload of mistakes in the thumbnails, but once you fix those mistakes, you move on to actual animation. This is where you make funny faces in the mirror, shoot some embarrassing reference video and take a lot of pictures of your hands. A good animator will get their butt out of the chair and do all the actions themselves to see exactly how they want this character to move. So, if you can imagine, I was jumping around the office a lot trying to figure out how some of this stuff worked. After that long, arduous process, I moved on to ink and paint. Here's where I went over: my animation with black outline painted in some black color and probably cursed myself a dozen times for scribbling instead of actually drawing during the animation stage. "Oh, I'll just figure out the details and ink and paint, no bad animator.". Hmm, anyways, next. We move on to finalization. I go back to the beginning and shade all of my color. By the way, this is all done in Flash. I forgot to mention and I say that because part of finalization is putting in backgrounds and I make all of mine in Photoshop, what's also interesting is sometimes the perspective in the background was a little too difficult for me to figure out on my own. But luckily for me, I had a 3D model of a stage on hand. It was the main set I used for my senior thesis film, Bottled Opera, link below. Any time I couldn't figure out a perspective, I would just open up that model in Maya and use his reference. So after all the shading in the background-ing, I move on to editing. I put all the shots in Adobe Premiere and spliced them all together. You find more mistakes, she adds more effects export and you're done. I sent it to Dane and he thought it was great. Well, I guess that's all I've got for you. If you want to see more of me in the future, just click that subscribe button and there's gonna be some awesome stuff coming your way. If you do the whole social media thing, I'm also on Twitter and Instagram. Oh, and if you aren't already, go subscribe to DaneBoe, because he is awesome. All right, see you guys.