This is a music video I directed and animated for the folks at Baker's Dozen. One of their rappers by the name of N/A had a single back in 2020 that needed some visuals and I was tapped for the job. So much has changed since those first few months of the pandemic: we've adjusted our lives, our livelihoods, hopefully tried new things; taken risks.

This project was about that. Unpaved territory.

Grid: Digital painting from the car-chase sequence (top left), two of the hand-drawn frames of the same (corners), the Neon Tally Girl (top right), and the canyon clip which I did by moving a piece of cutout paper across the sketchbook surface, and blending that with digital textures afterwards.

Above: Experimenting with shadows and no outlines. Would like to try a whole video this way someday. All photoshop with this section. Below: another fully hand-drawn part.

Many thanks to my dear wife staying up late with me in the throes of this project helping scan about a hundred or two sheets of tracing paper from start to finish.

Since this project I've spent a great deal of time researching and learning more about animation, and even begun pre-production on my own 23-minute animated episode of a series I hope to gather a team around me to finish someday soon. I'm very thankful for all this project taught me about animation principles, about how easy it is for animated projects to get out of hand in scope and size, the difference in usability between scans, photographs, and digital line-work and painting.

You'll see in the music video the many different ways I blended digital and analog methods: some clips are purely digital, others colored digitally but drawn by hand, and a few even drawn digitally but overlaid with photographs of paper textures, etc.

The full donut. Oh, the hours spent on this fella.

As I look back, even this hand-drawn section shows how little I knew about timing charts, how to keep the pages consistent—it is "on two's" though, in a weird, photoshopped way! haha

I'm proud of it though, even so. It's the first clip I ever animated without any of the line art being digital, and my love (and loathing) of the meticulous discipline of animation was born through realizing how damn exciting it was to see drawings come to life.

Linked below is the full music video on N/A's home channel; go ahead and show them some love! Anyone curious about what we do at SASAGU or want to commission something similar, feel free to drop a line whenever you like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceOSzQsCQjA

Thanks for stopping by. 

—Erik