“Hear Me”: a neo-noir music video to shake your butt to.
We recently had the exciting opportunity to direct, illustrate, and animate a music video for The Buttshakers’ song “Hear Me,” off their latest album Arcadia. We had a great time collaborating with the band on the development of the neo-noir style they wanted the song’s story to be portrayed in. Scroll down to see a breakdown of our music video animation process.
01. Concepting
The Buttshakers came to us with a very clear vision of the aesthetic they wanted for their video: a 2D neo-noir animation. The band was looking to tell the protagonist’s story against the backdrop of an ominous city. The first step in our animation process was adapting our personal illustrative styles to match this creative goal. We developed a series of sketches and digital paintings to set the tone for the minimalist, eerie city. Jagged angles, architecturally distressing tilts, and blurry figures leering from sidewalks would serve as the backdrop to the principal character’s journey.
When developing the style for this animation we drew a great deal of inspiration from iconic noir film directors like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Orson Welles. Their works in particular encouraged us to push perspectives and contrasts when developing compositions.
02. Character Design
When creating the protagonist the band expressed to us that they wanted her to be a woman of color from a decade between the ‘30s and ‘60s. This allowed us to explore a variety of hair and outfit styles, each of which added different backstories and personality traits to the character. Here you can see some pencil sketches of directions we played with as well as the finalized character concept.
03. Storyboarding
The Buttshakers came to us with a rough narrative for their video already outlined: in the song’s first 2 verses the character would be walking and driving through the city, at the start of the bridge her partner would push her down the stairs, and ultimately she would drive out of the city into the desert. Starting with this outline we developed a pencil sketch storyboard that took the protagonist along this journey through the city we had developed in the concepting phase. We added in over a dozen hidden omens to forewarn of the character’s fate and sketched shadows that would morph or move to indicate that not everything in her life was as it seemed.
04. Animatic
The last pre-animation step was to digitally illustrate and paint each shot of the video and set it to the song to give an idea of the final aesthetic and timing of each shot.
