Gutter Rabbit + Dudephone>X
This took a really interesting turn and it wasn't something that I expected at all. This piece was an assignment through Gunner School: my first 2 week long brief. The goal was to animate to a piece of music and I decided to veer off the beaten path by choosing a wild piece of music to work with.
When I was in high school, a friend of mine had a prog rock band. And like most high school students in performing arts schools with a prog rock band, the production value was through the roof. I must have acquired one of their CDs during senior year, and it's lived on my various computers and hard drives ever since.
One of the tracks was nothing but the drummer calling out time, the singer SCREAMING and crashing, aggro beats. This track has been my go to over the years for when I've needed to scream but propriety wouldn't permit me the space. I knew that this was the music I wanted to animate. It was begging to be animated.
Music Track
Rough Storyboards
We started with really rough thumbnails. I was battling some kind of sinus head cold at the time and I'll be the first to admit that I was not firing on all cylinders. I made some interesting choices, but in my congested head it made sense.
The clip that I chose from the track started with what felt like a sigh, like a moment of calming down before things were about to crash again. I wanted this lull into a false sense of security.
The blob bunny from my Gutter Rabbit ident kept popping up. At first I told myself that it was a place holder for a better character, or imagery but I think it was really more of a subconscious choice that I wasn't ready to commit to yet.
Refined storyboards
Once I started cleaning up my boards, it became so clear to me that this was begging to be a personal ident video. Something like a brand teaser because the music was pushing me more and more toward the exact kind of weird that I've been trying to capture. Because this wasn't quite a narrative, but was more of a stream of consciousness it felt so right to go all in on the blob bunny and then at that crescendo at the end to have the reveal of GUTTER RABBIT, LORI SCHKUFZA. It was the booming declaration of this is me that I had been searching for.
Color story
I did something I normally never do here, which was to make a color story once I felt good about where my boards were. It was really simple where I just took my boards and threw down some rough color to get a feel for how it would progress over the duration of the video.
Having done it here, I can see how invaluable it is as process. There were so many times in the past where I made my life so much more difficult than it needed to be by figuring out what was going to be what color in an asset building stage without thinking of the larger picture. Especially with the staccato background color change, I had to consider how everything would react to that. I made some color deviations once I got into animation, but by then it felt much more intentional instead of searching for what felt better.
I wanted to make use of texture on larger shapes and spaces. A big inspiration was Hervé Tullet and how he mixes crumpled paper with smooth to create this really dynamic contrast. Playing more with opacity was another must have. I wanted to have more of those overlapping shapes with opacity creating more depth. To better marry the hand drawn pieces to the After Effects shapes, I wanted to avoid any perfectly clean edges. If I could make a shape irregular, I would. In places where I was dealing with strokes, I made sure to roughen the adjacent edges.
The animated textures, part of the PQ Art Parts kit added the final touch. I kept to a selection of 3 or 4 textures that would build from more subtle to more chaotic as the video progressed. Sometimes you have to remind yourself that you have access to resources otherwise they just sit unused.
One thing that I'm really focusing on is marrying my illustration work to my animation more. And that means finding ways of injecting texture into my animation. This was a great project for that.