Elephant - Tame Impala [Music Video Animation]

  • Elephant
  • A music video animation for the song Elephant by Tame Impala off of their album "Lonerism". All backgrounds, modeling and animations were created by me; the backgrounds were drawn from scratch on Adobe Photoshop (not filtered images), the three-dimensional cityscape in Scene 2 was modeled and textured by me using Autodesk Maya, and the animation and characters were done using Adobe After Effects. gdfgsdfgret
     
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  • Behind The Scenes
  • Merging 2D with 3D
  • Beta Footage
  • This is a playblast (a preview render that is not fully developed) of a scene for my music video for the song Elephant by Tame Impala that I made. In order to create this scene, I modeled, textured and lit up this fictional city in Maya. To further blend the character animation to the maya scene, I created and animated a spotlight in Maya to act as the headlight for the hoverbike. After timing the animation of the hoverbike with the spotlight, I brought this footage into Adobe After Effects to animate the character. Upon completing the character animation, I swapped out the playblast with the completely rendered version to complete the scene.
  • Final Footage
  • This is the final version of this scene before being rendered in the whole video and receiving some environmental touch-ups such as dust and smoke.
  • The backgrounds that supplied Elephant's atmosphere were all drawn by me from scratch on Adobe Photoshop. Between a Wacom tablet, the Brush tool and the Polygon Lasso tool, I managed to create the scenes exactly how I storyboarded and envisioned them in my head. Below I selected some of the scenes from Elephant and positioned the raw photoshop image next to it so you can compare what was created in Photoshop versus what was created in After Effects.
  • As you can see in the image above this text, I created the character, the billboard, and the moon seperately from the Background image. Throughout all of Elephant, I animated the characters with Solid, Masked layers and animated the mask to create very fluid movement. Any other animated objects such as the billboard were also Solid layers with various effects on them (dependent on the object)
  • This image above shows the comparison between the concept image and the final footage. I chose to make a concept image for this scene because the pose of the characters were key and I wanted to make sure I got it exactly how it should be. To create the the flashing effect, I made all the layers in the scene three dimensional in After Effects, setup a three dimensional room, and created a Light to flash on and off with the muzzle flash. To exagerate the effect, I created the white solid layers that outline the right side of the characters and animated the opacity levels to match the muzzle flash as well.
  • This image shows the difference that stock footage can make to an environment. By simply adding some smoke and dust stock footage in the piece, my environments were brought to life.
  • Pre-production
  • The conceptualization for this project started with listening to the song Elephant by Tame Impala and thinking about what story this song is telling. After giving the song a few listens, I wrote up a few written storyboards defining potential settings and stories to work with and after considering time and entertainment value I decided to go with the written storyboard shown below. Once I decided on this story and setting, I immediately started on the visual storyboards. As you can see, I stayed very true to the storyboards.
  • Storyboards
  • Written Storyboard

Project By

Christian Hartsough
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

About Project

Entailing two minutes of animation synced to the audio track "Elephant" by Tame Impala, this project demonstrated key concepts in animation, cinematography, and storytelling while establishing skills in Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Premiere, and Autodesk Maya.
Published: March 02, 2014
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  • Project Copyright Info
    COPYRIGHT INFO:
    Attribution Non-commercial
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