Déjaview - Throwing Dirt Music Video

Over the last few months I've been working on and off on an animated music video for Future Flavour's up and coming artist Déjaview. The video follows a bear through a forest as he discovers music. This leads to him having a psychedelic experience which he eventually shares with the other animals around him.
 I really wanted to challenge myself creating this video by heavily relying on a broad amount of technical aspects for production. Primarily this meant I produced most of the backgrounds in 3D within Maya and animated characters in 2D within Flash. I then combined both worlds within After Effects; i'm very proud of the result.

For character design I didn't really stray too far from original concepts. The differences are pretty much unnoticeable in fact. However on the 3D side of things I did a lot of work trying to get a style that worked. At first every object in background was an actual 3D model. This proved to be a lot of work; neither did it look very good as the characters really clashed with the scenery. In the end I settled with 2.5D backgrounds which used curved planes of 2D images to give an illusion of full 3D. This had it's pluses and downsides. The good thing being I could produce backgrounds which blended well with my style. The downside was lighting was very hard to get right. I couldn't really use shadows as I rendered without raytracing. Meaning alpha maps wouldn't cast the correct kind of shadows. any shadows I made had to be faked later in After Effects.

   

An early concept render of the 3D environment.

I felt my approach to production worked pretty well for once on this animation. I had a clear idea of what I could achieve with each of the different set of tools that I used. Because of this I feel I scheduled appropriately. I deffinately want to keep animating using a range of different programs like I have. I think I need to work a lot on the 2D side of things in terms of animating. I felt some of my illustration could have been better but I'm not unhappy with it either.

I really Like the music for the video as well. And i'm not just saying that because I was paid either. I'm generally excited for Ben Potts (Déjaview) to release some new music. I've been whistling and humming this tune ever since I started working on the video and that's a very good sign considering I've been working on it for so long. Please go and support his music when his e.p. releases this month on the 31st