Here's the final video

25MB Quicktime Movie - May take a couple minutes to load up.

Designs

MSTRKRFT & Last Gang Records contacted Mike White to create a music video for their single "Work On You" in early 2006. By April later that year preliminary production design had begun and by June the 3 min. 47 sec. video was complete. From concept to completion it was 11 weeks of production that was thoroughly enjoyed by all. It can be rare when a project comes along that inspires artists and animators to feel so passionately about a small piece of film. This website will show the behind the scenes artwork that was created to make this video into what it was.

Here's the schedule we made and miraculously followed perfectly, everyone involved worked incredibly hard to maintain the schedule, in the end we came under budget and had a massive party afterwards to screen the video and feed everyone mountains of food and booze.

First thing's first, it all starts with an idea.
The band members gave us total creative freedom. All they asked for was that we gave it a Transformers / Akira / Astroboy feel to it. This is all you need to say to most animators and they'll shit their pants thinking of this golden opportunity. JFK and Al-P guided us for story, a rough idea regarding robot lovers running into some trouble with a lot of the video taking place as a flash-back with that soap opera-style haze ala Daft Punk's Interstella 5555.




Story art and character designs sort of happened simultaneously. Derek, Jeff and Mike coordinated their efforts to hash out a very rough thumbnail version of the storyboards while drawing dozens of sketches to determine the final look of the main characters. Instead of doing a detailled and clean storyboard after the thumbnails, we cut an animatic with those scanned drawings and once timing was locked we went straight to character posing.

Derek & Jeff staged the shots and did character layout scene for scene on paper, clean and in full detail often rendering them with markers as a guide for the clean-up crew to eventually know where the highlights were in the chrome-like skin that the robots had.

A lot of research was made in order to capture the style we were looking for. Color was primarily Chad's job, before he began cleaning up animation scenes, him and Derek took a few days to create the color models for all the characters and props.



The characters went through several stages of refinement before being inked in Flash, the basic design was locked on paper early on when it was obvious that we wanted a golden chrome droid goddess for the female character, and a good guy version of the comic book style Megatron. It wasn't a far stretch for Derek and Jeff to create these characters with 80's action/sci-fi cartoons fresh in their minds.

The final DVD covers made for the client.

Promotional Art

Storyboard & Animatic

Producing the rough storyboards took two weeks (another 3 weeks to 'clean' the boards into final key poses), even though it was only 3:47 in length, planning out each scene had to be done. We had to figure out the flow of every shot and how to convey each idea clearly, especially with most of the music video playing out as a 'flashback'.


































































































































These were small pencil & marker sketches on paper to get an idea of the composition. Then they got scanned and made into a leica reel in Flash. Afterwards, detailled scene by scene staging and posing started being drawn out as the character models were being revised, cleaned and painted.

Some panels were cut for time, but pacing out the animatic took a couple days, lining up some beats to the music and editing the artwork to fit length of the soundtrack, this was the final result.




To see more - click on "Older Posts" at the bottom.