This weird animation is based on a true story, as recounted by singer Paul Major from Endless Boogie. He saw KISS at a kite contest, where he was injured on an acid trip.
Brittany Penn and I animated the music video from March to May of 2018.
ANIMATIC
An Animatic is an animated storyboard that helps with timing the animation to work in sync with the soundtrack, planning camera moves, and coming up with the visual narrative.
In animation, it’s extremely costly to make editing decisions after the animation has begun. Therefore, the storyboarding phase is also the editing phase where shot compositions and the flow of cinematography is determined.
In live action the editing happens after the footage is shot, but in animation, it’s the opposite: the editing process occurs before the footage is produced.
But as you can see from comparing the animatic to the finished music video, I made some changes. So the animatic isn’t always set in stone. The experimental nature of music videos allows for improvisation. And of course every project is different with different levels of creative control.
Since the band wanted the animation to closely follow the story of the lyrics, it was necessary to flesh out the visual ideas before hand and present it to the band to make sure what I was envisioning matched up to their vision. Making tweaks to a storyboard is a lot easier than making tweaks to full animation.
I don’t always make an animatic for music videos. Often concept drawings or a rough storyboard are sufficient to act as a spring board for the animation to develop organically. Animating one scene after another often leads to happy accidents.
