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Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2011 9:38 pm
by tonym
Well, the police in your video are called the Jazz Police, not the Smooth Jazz Police, so it does kinda seem like jazz and smooth jazz are lumped together.

Maybe (dare I write this?) consider not using the word "jazz" at all in the video (Holy crap, what am I saying - "jazz" appear a LOT!).

You could substitute "smooth jazz" with "smooth music" or even "lame music."

On the police cars, the text could read "police" or "status quo police" or "goon squad" or a number, like "384."

And the name of the club could be changed to "Background Music Club," since smooth jazz is basically background music.

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 10:44 am
by Mikdog
Hi,

Thanks man, implemented some of your other changes:

http://vimeo.com/23030792

The chain on cat is not a bad idea, I may do that if there's another round of changes I do.

And that, I think, is nearly there.

Peace out,

Mike

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 7:05 pm
by tonym
WOW! This latest version is totally amazing exactly as it is.

It blows my mind that you planned and storyboarded a video this complicated, knowing fully well you'd have to animate it. Don't you have a part of your brain that says things like, "If I make it simpler I can cut my work in half?"

Cripes, if I draw shoe laces on a shoe that I'll later have to animate, my brain says, "SHOE LACES? Are you NUTS?!"

It's fun to pause your music videos and see all the details and nifty stuff that often fly by too fast to register.

Great job!

Tony

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 7:21 pm
by Mikdog
Thanks Tony.

Well, yes, I spent 2 solid weeks planning this out. Here's some pics of what my living area looked like with little storyboard cards all over the place.

Image

Image

Yes, I could have cut lots of corners but I figured I'd do as much as I can to make this something cool as I'm a massive 8-bit fan and it was great to get the opportunity to make an 8-bit animation - something I'd always wanted to do. And I really like working with Goldfish and I was pretty heavily personally invested in this job.

Also sketched out almost everything before going digital:

Image

And here's an early 8-bit proof of concept thing where I broke myself in to the pixel thing a bit:

Image[/img]

I also had a few people working on the pixel stuff - people from Germany, States, UK, France, local, a user from these forums, hope he doesn't mind me mentioning him, Velu from India, did some backgrounds, Madrid etc... so quite a few hands working on it even though I went over almost all the work myself but it was good to have bulk stuff done.

Here's some more pics of the storyboard situation I had going on:

Image

Image

And the layers window doesn't show all of the layers I had going on in this scene at all - I had about 5 fields worth of layers if I scrolled down to see them all expanded. Though to be fair, I had about 3 scenes worth of layers in this one file. The bar scene, dancing, etc...

Image

Still got stuff to do on it though!

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 8:06 pm
by tonym
Ooo, I can identify several scenes from the music video in your drawings. Neat.

WHOA. That is a LOT of cards.

EDIT: Question removed. You added more pictures before I posted this, and they answered my question.

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 8:32 pm
by sbtamu
What would happen if your brother turned on the ceiling fan? :oops:

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 9:03 pm
by Mikdog
I'd go 'ha ha ha! What a good joke!'

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 10:36 pm
by tonym
Mikdog wrote: I also had a few people working on the pixel stuff - people from Germany, States, UK, France, local, a user from these forums, hope he doesn't mind me mentioning him, Velu from India, did some backgrounds, Madrid etc... so quite a few hands working on it even though I went over almost all the work myself but it was good to have bulk stuff done.
Periodically, I've considered recruiting people to help me complete my big animated project, but I always chicken out.

Would you make a post about how you managed your music video project and what happened along the way? Like, did you have prior experience as a project manager? How did you go about recruiting other people? What problems did you have during production? What things went better than expected?

How much input did Goldfish have on the project?

Did you ask for changes to the completed animations, and were your animators agreeable to making changes? Did the animators easily adapt to your style or did you have to tweak everything everybody did?

Assuming you paid the animators, how did you pay them, given that they were spread all over the planet? Did you use contracts?

Sorry for the Attack of the Questions! My curiosity is boundless.
Tony

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 10:54 pm
by Mikdog
Hiya Tony,

I plan on putting a 'making of' clip together while the video is being colour corrected.

But in brief - this is the first time I've asked for large-scale help on a project. Pixel work is super time intensive - easy to put down basic strokes with a table but any stray pixels - even one, can look out of place. And I like to clean up the pixels in a way that there are no sharp and heavy corners, which literally, takes hours upon hours.

Anyway, it generally worked out pretty well, I found a bunch of people from pixeljoint.com and wayofthepixel forums, Internet browsing, someone's clay work I'd liked before, someone's son I had heard about who did good work, someone else's work I had liked for a while, so I contacted people individually and assessed their work, giving them work I found suited to them. As we worked together, it became clearer what their strengths and weaknesses were and so I could send them through scenes geared up with them in mind and notes based on their previous work. I paid everybody on individual needs, one guy I paid a set price for the whole project, others were based on per scene, others based on per background, and it was a LOT of work, I did roughs for nearly all scenes, and then the people did the brute force of it, I cleaned up nearly every single piece, some were better than others, I had two guys that really got the hang of it quickly, there were language barriers in some cases, some work I scrapped and redid, no contracts, but I got to know the people a bit over email beforehand. The clay animator I met in person, only a few I got from them contacting me, it was mostly me finding people and targeting them directly.

Sometimes I wondered if a particular piece would have just been easier for me to do from scratch, as there were sometimes a lot of changes to be made, sometimes so many that we agreed on a price renegotiation, but other times people really did great work that I was pleased with, and in some cases really did save me a bunch of time.

I generally paid around $25.00 - $40.00 for a character scene, that is, all the character work in a scene. I did a character chart with colours that people could follow. For smaller scenes I'd scale the price, for larger more complicated scenes, price would go up. I got a feel fairly quickly what pixel artists would go for, some people would flake on me, I paid on completion of work though. Another guy has helped me the whole project, someone from Germany, who I sent work to do basic touch-up, recolour stuff (I'm partially colour-blind) but at the end of the day I spent a lot of time going over each scene and frame and retouching, some people sent through PSD files with lots of layers combined which was a pain to cut up if I wanted to animate individual pieces at different speeds.

So, sometimes was great, sometimes not, but generally I'm pretty pleased with the whole experience. I blew much more than half the entire budget on getting help with this, a German team animated the 3D voxel scene, so in the beginning stages I spent a lot of time making notes and sketches and roughs and explaining things - generally people were happy to make a couple of changes to a piece. Some more willing than others.

At the end of it I put it all together and did multiple passes, changing and noodling, getting feedback, etc... until I was pleased.

I used PayPal to pay, I think what I found is generally people want to do good work.

I used the XE.com currency converter to figure out how currencies scaled, Goldfish had quite a bit of input into the project, we discussed an 8-bit video for a while, then they came up with the idea of the jazz police and katsha and kenny g (names I've since taken out) and then I moulded a basic story around that and went to town, making lists of video games I want to include, lots and lots of ideas of storyboards of which I used but a fraction, and then piecing it together into a story.

So, first time getting lots of people to do stuff, but I was pretty detailed in most cases about what I wanted, I'm interested to finally count how many people I had working on this but I estimate around 14 or so.

Backgrounds, I paid around $7 - $15 for a background, sometimes $20 or thereabouts.

Peace out,

Mike

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 11:35 pm
by tonym
Wow wow wow, your post was more detailed than I hoped it would be.
Thanks for all that excellent information, Mike.

:)
Tony

Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2011 2:29 am
by neeters_guy
Vimeo looks way sharper than Youtube. Are you doing something differently with the uploaded videos or is that just the way the host service processes the vids?

Anyway ... wow, another entertaining masterpiece! And plenty of video game/pop culture references warrants multiple viewings.

Thanks for sharing ... to you, tonym and all the other great commenters. It's fascinating watching the creative process at work.

Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2011 3:12 am
by Mikdog
Hey Neeters,

For the latest Vimeo video I rendered out a much better quality preview file. The YouTube ones were around 30 - 40 mb. This latest Vimeo one was 121 mb I think. I'll possibly do much higher quality for final renders, still want to add stuff to video though. Vimeo, I think and I could be mistaken, doesn't crunch videos as much as YouTube, though I could be totally wrong. A buddy suggested that use Vimeo for final work posting and generally stuff tends to look better on Vimeo.

Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2011 11:14 am
by AmigaMan
Just wanted to say how fantastic your new Goldfish video is. I've just seen this thread and hesitated to post as I had nothing of use to add to the conversation. Others there have done a great job of noticing and suggesting improvements. Brilliant work!
I enjoyed looking through your storyboards and reading about your experiences. Thanks :D

Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2011 3:00 pm
by Mikdog
Thanks AmigaMan.

These boards weren't final. This may be a little premature since I haven't wrapped this up yet, but here's the animatic:

http://bruandboegie.co.za/gfsh/WCT_animatic_2.m4v

And an explanation of what's happening in the video, slowed down:

http://bruandboegie.co.za/gfsh/WCT_explanation.3gp

Peace,

Mike

Posted: Tue May 10, 2011 7:57 pm
by Mikdog
Friendly Internet Forum People, I wonder if I may please borrow your eyes for a second.

I have a team doing some colour correction on the video. However, its unclear as to whether the original or the changed version looks better.

Please take a gander at this image:

Image

It flashes between the original and the corrected one. I won't say which is which, it even took me a bit of time to figure it out, but if you could please let me know whether the 'darker' image or 'lighter' image looks better.

Thanks,

Mike

[EDIT] ok decided with the lighter image. The lighter one is the colour corrected one. Peace. Hopefully the bright colours don't bleed too much and get washed out on TV. But I like the more poppy colours.