Quasimoto- Bully's Hit (2005) Part 2

After a month or so, most of the ideas started to gel. The storyboards I presented involved Quasimoto (though, the little yellow character we were animating wasn't truly Quasimoto. Quas was supposed to be 'the unseen', and for the most part, no one knew who this yellow guys was, but anyways...) and he was being abducted into a graffiti piece by the evil Lord Inamel. Inamel was a character that was supposed to represent what i saw as the blatant bloated ego involved in most street art. Especially in that street art employs so many strict rules. The arm band was supposed to signify this 'fascist' trait.

I also wanted the video to play as my 'love letter' to graffiti art. A part of my own past that I've always cherished. The world we were creating here was a sort of 'land of graffiti', in which names of all of the legendary graffiti artists stood on rolling hills. You'll see Vamm, Dondi, Taki 183, Blade etc all placed in there one way or another. One thing I'd wanted to be mindful of this project was also my color palette. As the video progresses, I wanted the colors to get darker and darker, until we find ourselves in Inamels evil lair.

On a handful of shots, I was hoping to have some 3D camera moves. The problem was I was using some pretty primitive software for the shots. I literally would spec the scene objects out, then trace them frame by frame to give them the hand drawn look. The results were mixed, but it gave the video a bit of dimension and depth.

I started to composite all of these separate elements, which was a pretty daunting task. So many pieces need to be laid out, and work together. Plus, I was assigning a bit of a blur to all of them to take some of the 'vector' edge off of everything (since most of them were created in Flash and Illustrator). Another method I was trying out was assigning  textures to animated vector elements (importing pixel patterns and imagery into vector animations):

After about 5 months, I finally had something to present to the label. Egon was pretty happy. It was somewhat incomplete, s the original treatment had Quas getting actually sucked into the wall, whereas this version started with him in the vortex at the beginning. 4 months later, I finally delivered the video with complete intro. It was probably one of my most ambitious videos (though, I always thought I could have made it way better), and something I've always been proud of.