Band Project - Enlightened by Animals 4D

The final aspect of the band project, 4D, consisted of creating an animation put to music. ​

I began researching types of animation that I could use for my project. As a main theme across my project as been shadows and lights I looked into shadow puppetry. Shadow puppetry originated in Central Asia, with the significant historical examples of shadow play theatre originating China, Southeast Asia and India.
An example found on YouTube:

I also looked into 2D animated music videos, specifically those that use simplistic colour palettes. Song: Jailbreak by Neru, chosen for the use of orange, and focus on black and white accents 

​As I had no previous animation experience I started with some simple animation practice in the base ProCreate app.

​From this practice I concluded that I wanted to create a digital 2D animation.

I then started to look for a song to animate to. I ended up choosing the song, ‘Pools’ by Glass Animals for my band, it has a jungle-theme to its sound fitting in with the animal theme of my own band Enlightened by Animals. ​

​I wanted to create an animation using a simple colour palette, I chose to reflect some of my previous work when I created merch mock-ups and designs for my band. 
My plan is to reflect this colour palette within my animation:

Initial Ideas and Storyboards

I also drew some sketches from images of hyenas to gain a better understanding of how to draw them and the two different types, spotted and striped. A spotted hyena is the main focus of my animation, they are larger and a more rounded ear shape, compared to the striped hyena which are smaller and have pointed ears.

I then created refined storyboards for the first section of animation I planned to complete 

From these storyboards I created other short animation segments in the base ProCreate app, but would switch to ProCreate dreams for the remainder of the project 

When I began animating using ProCreate Dreams I initially struggled with the process, both due to my lack of previous animation experience and with teaching myself the software. The first section I chose to animate for this part was the hyena walking across the screen. Originally I created this in lineart, however I would instead choose to use a black silhouette instead (with the hyena’s eye visible), as this would link with the previous theme of shadow and light in my band project, and made animating later scenes quicker and easier.

I recreated the initial sunrise animation in ProCreate Dreams. I chose to animate at 7fps.

I then animated some segments in between using the warp tool. I also added a second walk animation.

Final Animation