Risk Assessment

My Narrative

I decided to illustrate my narrative briefly on the storyboard so when it comes to the actual animations, I can freely move them about in a way that will be suitable with the resources I have, but with a clear story in mind. Each image I have drawn represents a single important part in the video where a setting might change or a new character introduced. In my actual video, I will use stop animation which will mean hundreds of photos compressed into the film - so obviously I could not draw each one out. 

My character goes on a small adventure, being taken around - hence "Feel to Follow".

Many of these ideas such as the moon and the abstract/hallucinogenic nature of my ideas have been heavily influenced by the Mighty Boosh.

The part where he is stood on the clock hand is influenced by a scene in Disney's version of Peter Pan.

When my character is falling, I plan on having a psychedelic whirlwind referencing Alice in Wonderland.

Animatic

Storyboard

 

Animated Videos of the Indie Rock Genre

Animation is used in more unusual songs that appeal to a niche audience. Rock music consists of various sub genres; some are simple Indie Rock, others are more weird and wonderful - falling into the psychedelic category. Abstract songs do not only have to be unusual musically, the lyrics may have many meanings so animated, narrative and abstract videos help reflect the feeling rather than the meaning.

Animation Techniques

2D Animation Techniques

Classic, hand drawn animation - Disney's Lion King.

Cut outs - Monty Python (see also in stop motion and in 3D. This technique crosses all barriers)

Rotoscope - Waking Life

Flip book - Keith Haring has made some famous ones.

Computer Assisted Animation (2D)

This term refers to all types of animation that use a computer somewhere in the process.
One could argue that this means ALL ANIMATION today.
Mostly we use it to describe the tools that have come to replace pencil, paper and film, for example:

Flash animations - Many TV series are now done in Flash

Colouring and layering hand drawn animation using a computer

Drawing directly into an animation software with a Pen Tablet

3D Animation Techniques

3D animation- Pixar's Up, Toy Story

Stereoscopic 3D - Coraline, Avatar

CGI cut out - South Park

Motion Capture (an aid tool for 3D animators) - Final Fantasy, Avatar, Gollum in Lord of the Rings.

Morphing (the changing faces in Michel Jackson's Clip Black or White)

Stop Motion Techniques

Clay or Plasticine ("Claymation") - Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit

Real Clay animation (and lots of other stuff you won't suspect) - Jan Svankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue

Puppet animation- Tim Burton and Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas

Pixilation - Peter Gabriel's music video "Sledgehammer"

Cut outs - Daniel Greave's Flat World is a stunning combination of classic hand drawings with cut outs.

Types of Animation that are done on a light table, shot frame by frame under a camera:

Sand animation - This is sometimes done as a performance art, shown live for an audience, and sometimes it's stop framed into proper film.

Oil colours - Caroline Leaf's The Street, and the frankly-unbelievable Old Man and the Sea by Alexander Petrov.

Plasticine - Ishu Patel's Afterlife, Cage the Elephant's Aberdeen

Types of animation named after a software

Some types of animation are named after the software used to create them.
Flash animation has come to mean a certain kind of graphic look and feel, which has also spawned the pleading request "Can you make it NOT look like Flash, PLEASE!"

There are also:

GIF animations - GIF is a type of file format, used for small, light weight animations with no more than a few frames.

After Effects animation - usually means either cut outs done in After Effects, or animation done with the program's Puppet Tool.

Blender, Mudbox, and Maya - all names of 3D animation software.

Pivot stick figure - A freeware for making stick figure animations. So simple, and so popular!

Morphing is a type of animation that uses a software to fill in the gap between two images - MJ's "Black or White" music video.

I would like my music promo to be an animated narrative. I will do this by first scanning my initial drawings into the editing suite to create my first draft, and then put in my images and ideas digitally if it does not look good using a graphic tablet. I have taken influences from other videos from artists like Arcade Fire. I have shot some performance in case I decide to incorporate it with my narrative later on for initially I planned on having a combination of performance and animations. I plan to use subtle intertextuality throughout the music video to reflect my main influences.