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I thought I’d explain the design process for my characters from my animated music video, ‘Dead All Along.’

In the image above you can see the original character design drawing, top left. All the characters for ‘Dead All Along’ started on paper, first as blue pencil drawings, then as pen and ink. I scanned the drawing into photoshop and tweaked the levels so that I the texture of the paper is visible – I really wanted to make the ‘Dead All Along’ world seem as if it was a paper world, almost as though an Edward Gorey inspired book had come to life.

Once in Photoshop, I ‘cut out’ each part of the character so that it can be animated in a cut-out animation style within After Effects. This character didn’t have to animate too much so it only has 9 separate bits, including 2 heads for the blink (eye open, eye closed). You can see the separate body bits in the bottom right of the above image. I cut and separate the body bits using the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop creating a loose outline of the body part.

For coloring, I like to color in Photoshop. I use Photoshop because I can easily combine textures with the original character drawing and also because I like to be able to experiment with color ideas. I typically use textures in my coloring process and the characters for ‘Dead All Along’ were also colored with a lot of textures. I keep a texture library of textures on my computer that are scans and photographs of textures, patterns etc. One of my favorite set of textures is a book of origami paper that I scanned in – I used several of these origami papers to color and texture the characters in ‘Dead All Along.’ I’m also fond of the Maxon collection of comic patterns, and I have several of these scanned that I use. Below you can see a screen-shot of my texture library (top), a screen-shot of the textures and layers of the coloring process in Photoshop (middle), and a sample of the texture palette I used for the bird (and yes, that is a wallpaper pattern from the 1970′s :)

‘Dead All Along’, my recent animated music video, is featured on Juxtapoz over at their blog: http://www.juxtapoz.com/Current/edward-gorey-inspired-music-video-for-dead-all-along.

I’m really happy to be on Juxtapoz as I’m a huge fan of their art and culture themed magazine and admire many of the artists they feature :)

‘Dead All Along’ is an Edward Gorey inspired animated music video performed by the talented Ceri Frost.

Big thank you to Katie Zupann and the rest of the crew at Juxtapoz.

‘Dead All Along,’ performed by Ceri Frost, is featured on Cartoon Brew here: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/music-videos/dead-all-along.html.

‘Dead All Along,’ is an animated music video set in my version of on an Edward Gorey world. Cartoon Brew is an amazing site that probably doesn’t need an introduction, but it’s chock full of talent and inspiration of the animation kind.

Another big thank you to Jerry Beck!

Yesterday I released the animated music video for the song ‘Dead All Along’ by Ceri Frost. Today ‘Dead All Along’ was featured on Vimeo’s Staff Picks channel :)

‘Dead All Along’, By Ceri Frost, Dir by Giles Timms (2:13)
Enchanted by a pixie, a child called Yorick enters a magical kingdom, but when Yorick returns he finds his world ravaged by time. Made at the Animation Workshop at UCLA’s Department of Theater, Film and Television, 2009.

The animated music video is set in a hand drawn pen and ink world inspired by Edward Gorey and animated in a cut-out style. Compositing and animation in After Effects.

You can view the video on vimeo here:

Image stills from my new music video, Dead All Along, performed by Ceri Frost.

Enchanted by a fairy, a child called Yorick briefly journeys in the fairy kingdom, but when Yorick returns to his world he discovers that everything has changed. The art direction for the film is inspired by the work of Edward Gorey and so the worlds and characters are hand-drawn in pen and ink.

Produced at UCLA’s Department of Theater, Film and Television, Animation Workshop. To be released this fall, 2009 :)