Jagmac — Right Back With You
The stakes were high on this project. Jagmac music group had secured meetings with MGM, Disney, and several other studios. They had produced a new album with a sharply different sound than anything they had produced in the past. They needed a music video that could sell to the biggest names in the business. With Nathan Colby directing and myself steering the art direction and animation production, we were able to create a video that wowed the executives at Disney and helped net Jagmac their feature as Radio Disney’s Next Big Thing.
Client
- Jagmac
- Unitas Entertainment
Year
2017
Role
- Planning & Strategy
- Filming and Set Production
- Art Direction
- Animation
- Compositing
- Design & Post Production
Director
- Nathan Colby
Pre Production & Planning
We wanted to create a style that straddled the lines between mature, artistic, and youthful energy.
We chose to stage the video in an open, worn-down, neutral, indoor location with good natural light. This let us transition between bright, naturally lit scenes and dark scenes with dramatic lighting and a more mature-feeling atmophere. The aged, dusty environment would contrast with young, colorfully presented subjects.
Against the worn, plain backdrop, we wanted to use bright, colorful hand-drawn elements as imaginary props, patterns, and accentuations. We wanted it to look like we had taken the film and painted on top of it. These art effects would compliment the bright outfits and expressive choreography of the group members.
Production
Cold! It was very cold (25°F). Everybody was a trooper. We shot the entire video over two days, making the best of our December daylight and our small crew. We shot it all on one Canon C200 mounted on a MōVI Pro gimbal. We installed LED strips on the pillars to create the dramatic lighting we wanted for our night scenes. We had scripted most of the choreography around the hand-drawn props we were going to add in post.
Post Production
What kind of vindictive, sadistic person makes you hand-draw animation in this day and age? Oh, right, that’s on me. Despite the challenge, it was a lot of fun.
We didn’t have the time to use actual cell animation or the budget to use TV Paint on Cintiqs. I devised an animation workflow in Photoshop using an iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and the Astropad app. We used the Ps onion skinning capabilities to let us draw on layers over our footage. We used the amazing brush set by Kyle T. Webster to give the illusion of markers, paint, chalk, and pastels. We used After Effects to composite the animations, as well as to create certain features such as the patterns and the pre-chorus greenscreen animation.
The main art direction challenges were to train our illustrators how to animate, our animators how to illustrate, and train both on the workflow I created with Photoshop and the iPad. We also needed to ensure that the art didn’t just live up to our quality standards, but also matched the desired tone, look, and feel of the video as a whole.
