Christmas Card from agency WHI to our client Harley-Davidson. ------------------------------- The Story: The holidays were on their way and the agency wanted to do something special for our client. Now, being a creative director on the Harley account has some distinct advantages and this year it was my exposure to "Biker Clause". Who the f*ck is Biker Clause you ask? Only the dude that whooped Santa's arse all the way back to the toy shop... that and some weird "equity" that had been created years before I worked on the business. Anyway, they wanted to send HD a card. I said no. Turns out one of our writers is also an accomplished comedian and song writer. He had mentioned a holiday album he had been writing and mentioned recording a holiday song about HD. So I decided to do a music video for the song to answer said brief. I had one week, the song and a rough idea on the style and story I wanted. ------------------------------- The Technique: I really wanted to emulate the Southpark style. Did some simple test animations and a lot of watching Southpark and smoking weed. I did all of the art in Illustrator, some general Photoshop stuff for art prep, and all of the motion in After Effects. My initial assumption was that it would be an easy technique to pull off since it looks so simple in final form. Since the actual show is done in a 3D Application and I was gonna use After Effects I knew there would be some inventive techniques I would have to employ. After doing some initial test animations I knew it would be all about nuance. For instance, sometimes in Southpark an animation will "Tween" from point A to B (i.e. an arm waving), other times the object would "Pop" from one piece of art to another (i.e. a hand going from pointing to a fist). Pop-swapping art for certain actions sucks and is time consuming... and completely unavoidable if you are like me and want it to look correct. Accept it. The REAL diss on the Tweened animations which are normally the easier thing to animate since you define the start and finish point and the software does the rest. The problem is that it looks too smooth and not choppy-time-lapse-cut-papery-slop like SP does. I solved that by animating at 10 FPS then exporting that comp into a final comp to be exported at the standard 30 FPS. Boom. Choppy. 1 week later and there ya have it. -------------------------------- The Specs: Apps: Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects Production Duration: 1 week Inspiration: Southpark, Biker Clause, lack of sleep