Alien Attack

The project

Me and the art collective Back2Morrow are working on a long term project related to music and videogames. 
As a first entry we decided to do a 80's anime inspired music video.
The music was  kindly contributed by Te!Jay & Back2Morrow

References and Conceptualization

Being a huge Power Rangers fan the first thing that came to my mind was to recreate a summarised version of the average Power Rangers episode.
First of all I quickly wrote down the main passages of the video:
-Initial moment of peace
-Sudden alien attack
-Focus on the horoes' different vehicles
-First confrontation
-Mecha assemblement
-The heroes defeat the alien monster

I then laid down a mental list of references I would need and  I started looking for material.

Designing the Characters 

While designing the monster I got a bit carried away and started drawing very complex shapes. Those were great for understanding the overall vibe I wanted to give to the antagonist of the story, but in the end I decided to go for a much simpler option.

Going into the main characters' designs I knew that they would have the most impact on the style of the video.
One aspect that I always try to focus on while styding animation and persuing my own style is simplification.
In my workflow I tend to overdesign at first and then gradually get rid of the unnecessary lines.
I really wanted them to wear an helmet but that would have made all the singing parts harder to figure out so I went for a clear glass type of helmet.

Storyboarding

When I do traditional storyboards for my projects I often find it hard to time properly my scenes, especially in the case of a faster paced video. Thus, when I work on my project I usually go straight into making a sketched animatic for the video. I feel like that allows me to sometimes better layout my scenes and have a better understanding of the transitions between the scenes too.
To emphasize the feeling of drama and action I decided to make the first 20 seconds or so of the video very slow paced and calm in order to create a strong contrast with the rest of the video.

Making of the video

Having finished the sketched animatic, I decided I would finish the whole video first and then consider if it'd be worth to include the intro.
Animating the video was pretty straightforward as I had spent a lot of time in preparation and just had to redraw and clean up the whole thing as much as I could before the deadline.
To cut some time I used some photo assets here and there, blending them with the background. This Masaaki Yuasa-inspired technique was very efficient and I love the result. 
I think I am going to incorporate it even more in my personal projects.

Coloring and VFX

While I was working on the animation I came up with a plot point that would have an aesthetic impact on the video. The attacking alien race feeds of all kinds of waves, and in this case light waves specifically.
I tend to go overboard with colors sometimes, and limiting my palette to greyscale for much part of the video was very helpful. 
I also wanted to make the robot morphing part as epic and exciting as possible, but at the same time I knew that technically that part would be a bit beyond my possibilities.
So after looking for some references videos I decided to go with a very heavy effecting on that part. I think it works pretty well as a tribute to 80's aesthetic too.

Long Term Vision

As I've seen the participants are encouraged to show case as much of their overall production as possible, so I tought I'd explain what my goals are for this project and the long term collaboration I'm building with artists from the rap scene.
Having been a musican myself I am profoundly passionate about the topic of music, and seeing how well it interacts with animation I aim to work on as many cool projects as possible in the future. Thus, I am trying to build connections to reach artists that I admire but that are pretty high up.
So here's a snippet of a future video that I will try to pitch to a very big name, in hope that he'll like it.