"Is There Really No Happiness?" Music Video
Winter 2024
A music video made for Porter Robinson's song "Is There Really No Happiness?" This is a class assignment.
Skills: 3D Modeling, 3D Animation, 2D Animation, Narrative Design Tools Used: Blender Modeling, Blender Grease Pencil, Adobe After Effects
Overview
For the final of my Animation: Methods of Motion class, I was tasked to create an animation that was over a minute long, the rest was open ended. With the recent release of Porter Robinsion's album "Smile", and me increasing interest in "2.5D" (combining 2D and 3D elements) animation, I took this as an opportunity to head first into it and combine both of these interests into a project!
Final Product
Initial Ideas and Storyboarding
The theme of "Is There Really No Happiness?" by Porter Robinson is nostalgia. My main source of nostalgia comes from the magic of animation, (before I knew the grueling work that went into it), so I knew I had to animate to this song. I wanted to capture a sort of child-like style for the 2D elements. To match it, I went with a low-poly modeling style with an outline, but to be honest, part of my reasoning was also because it would be faster to model as I only had three weeks for this assignment.
The scenes that I decided on were partially influenced by the lyrics: the girl watching her laptop when the lyrics go "I remember the family PC". But, in general, the scenes capture my feelings about art and animation. Yes, the character in the MV is supposed to be me, it is a little embarassing to admit but this is my animation so I get to call the shots around here.
Animation Setup
Once the story board was done, it was time to model the 3D elements. Everything in this animation is modeled from scratch by me, I really wanted to have a consistent style throughout the whole video. This is a simple way to give polish to the final piece without having to "upgrade" anything. I was already working with two things, if the 3D already looked messy, it would be hard to insert the 2D animation in later.
The colors were inspired by the main colors on the album that this song was off of, I thought it was a good nod to the album art and allowed me to have an easier time with the materials for the 3D models. Before I knew, the due date for the animatic was here.
2D Animation
With the camera movement down, it was time to add in the Grease Pencil (2D) animation. The pauses of the camera were to let the animation play out, until the angle changes again and reveals the flatness of the image. To match the scribbly-ness of the artstyle, I used very simple shading and a lower frame rate to create a feeling that a child's doodles had come to life. There is also symbolism contained in this style. Maybe you've noticed, but all the things drawn in 2D are fleeting; the scene that is modeled in 3D is unchanging, they are objects, but the little me who was there is grown up now. They are memories that were painted by me when I was little, it only makes sense that they are scribbled like a kid's drawing. As the 3D character (current me) looks back, I can only remember those moments as I've felt them before as a child.
3D Animation
So this leads us to the 3D animated portion. The only 3D object that is actually animated is the character. At this point, I was on a really tight timeline, with little experience with 3D animation, I knew that I couldn't do it from scratch, so I went online to use some resources. What I ended up doing was using open source Mixamo mocap data for the walking and running animations. This pivot worked out pretty well as I enjoyed the contrast between the 2D animation's choppy frames and the smoothness of the 3D model. The movement at the end was just simple pose to pose.
Besides the technical things I learned from this project, the other main thing I learned is where to cut my losses and stop being stubborn. Going into this project I wanted to do everything from scratch, but even with meticulous planning things will still go wrong along the way. It is important to learn how to pivot, when to seek help. The end result might actually be better than first envisioned.
