"I Think of Demons" by Roky Erickson & the Aliens tells of a troubled mind eased by love. Erickson suffered from schizophrenia, which caused him to hear voices and see visions. His songwriting started to take on darker themes and a harder edge. This song, however, is one with some serious pop sensibility. Catchy riffs lighten lyrics about the Devil and his cohorts tormenting his mind. His only respite, the one light able to shine through the darkness, his love.
This project saw me through what felt like the entire Adobe Creative Suite. After storyboarding and sketching, I started to illustrate the characters in Procreate. I initially planned to do most of the animation in After Effects by moving frames and layers. But my instructor, Erik Fadiman, encouraged me to try Adobe Character Animator. A few tutorial videos later I was illustrating with character rigging in mind. First the characters where drawn in layers in Procreate. From there, they were exported to Photoshop for some touch ups and to organize and name my layers for use in Character Animator. Once in Character Animator, I was able to rig the characters to respond to my motions through my webcam. From there, things got a little zany.
It can take a minute to warm up to it, but shaking around and making faces in front of your webcam can be very exciting when you see the figure on the screen mimicking your movements. It can also be great exercise! I really worked up a sweat animating some of these characters. By nature, I'm a living cartoon character. So being goofy and making outlandish, exaggerated motions was a piece of cake.
Of course, there were some difficulties. Having the space to be fully visible to the webcam and not whack your limbs on the surrounding furniture is a luxury. It's easy to go out of frame and have the camera lose track of your movements, causing the character's corresponding movements to stop. Properly rigging a character made from scratch takes some trial and error until you understand the mechanics of Character Animator. It's not always clear which parts should be pinned or independent. Floating heads and pendulum bodies were not uncommon.
Once I had footage of my characters in action, it was time to get into the nitty gritty of After Effects. Additional motion was added through various transformations and VFX. The backgrounds were stylized using stock footage of psychedelic swirls of colors, flames, and fog. Now the video was really starting to take shape. Footage was eventually brought into Premiere Pro for some final edits and polish. The video below is the fruit of these labors. Enjoy!
