Work Process

Ghost Town was a collaborative animation project, which focused on providing visuals for a song from the artist GumShoe. The 2D animation was completed after a timespan of three and a half months by five classmates and me. The main programs we used were Krita, Procreate, Maya3D for scene blockouts and After Effects for postproduction.

Our very first task during this project was to create a storyline for the song. We listened to it together and sketched whatever ideas would come to us. Afterwards we would talk about them and slowly form our differing ideas into a solid storyline. The concept phase continued by creating storyboards for the main beats music video. At this point we already split the workload. My tasks included storyboard creation, backgrounds and postproduction. The first part was done relatively quickly. Our only issue at that point was that the pacing was a bit off, so we ended up tweaking it by adding, holding or removing certain scenes or frames.

After the animatic was approved by everybody we could delve into the real workload of the project: animating everything. This was definiteley the most labor intensive part of the project and not without having to withstand quite some stress. Luckily everyone managed to pull through and we helped each other to finish the project in time. At the very end the postproduction part ended up being quite some work too because of the compositing and additional effects as well as lyrics that needed to be animated in the video. This too thankfully worked out well.

My main take away from this project is that time can really make a huge difference. Even though it got a bit stressful towards the end, we managed to complete everythinga nd make it look good in the process. That is a feat only a good team can achieve.

if you want to watch the music video, click the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDYont3ntcs