The project
The assignment was to make an animation music video of any kind. After some thinking, I decided that a parody music video would be the most fun to do. I could make one for the typical songs, but at the time I had just discovered the world of comedy so I was thinking about how could I mix that up. Bo Burnham is an American comedian who bases his comedy using clever, provocative songs. For me, this was the obvious choice.
Bo Burnham - Ironic
Animated video
Duration: 03:11 min
Made in September of 2022
The idea
The song has 17 short jokes in it so I thought about illustrating each one to hopefully add to the comedic effect. This concluded in about 20 different illus- trations which now have to be put together to make sense.
In Illustrator it is important to put each element that will be animated on its own layer. Later, this makes it possible to control the elements’ animations in After Effects.
Storyboard
This is the more progressive storyboard with the final images. All done in Adobe Illustrator using a Wacom tablet. Once I put it in After Effects I will play with transitions and other technicalities.
The storyboard
Animating
In After Effects I mostly controlled the keyframes of Scale, Position and Rotation to do my animation. I did some things with the Puppet tool and applied Motion Blur and Easy Ease where needed. Easy Ease is used to adjust the speed of change as motion advances toward and retreats from a keyframe. This gives much more control over the motion of an object. It is necessary to use to achieve smoothness in animation, something that is already in place when shooting a real video. I had to add Motion Blur because it also adds to the feeling of movement in still images. I exported the video as Apple ProRes 422 HQ so I could put it in Premiere Pro where I would pair the video and audio, and fix some transitions and minor mistakes.
A screenshot of the project being made in After Effects
Example of a graph of Easy Ease
To not overload my computer I had an After Effects file for every "joke". In each file, I had the song in the programme to time the animation right. I exported each short video separately and used Premiere Pro for merging them and making extra transitions where needed. I removed the audio from all the clips because some clips were overlapping and began combining the clips to the song so it fits. It is incredibly important the animation and the song are timed perfectly.
