Motivation has been tough this strange year, and I was looking for a kick in the butt to pour a bunch of love into a project. It felt like a sign when Flamingosis asked if I was interested in doing a music video for him. I’ve worked with Aaron (the guy behind Flamingosis) before, and I knew he was a chill fella who was down for anything, so he had no problem with my request for total creative freedom to do whatever I wanted. I was lucky enough to assemble a whole crew of amazing and talented friends that weirdly wanted to help me out on this, and I couldn’t have done it without them.
Full credits:
Direction, Illustration, Animation
Nick Parente
2D Animation
Ryan Boyes, Emily Kundrot, Scott Hoch, Po-Chen Chia, Dave Holm, Mel McCann, Jake Williams
Justin Lemmon, Jade Kuzak, Issey Roquet, Eddy Nieto, Gung-Kai Koo, Ivyy Chen
3D Animation
Julie Craft, Billy Chitkin
Special Thanks
The Boxfort fam, Jade Kuzak, Dan Stack, Tom Goulet, Anna Aichinger
Pre-production
I couldn’t help but envision a super funky 80’s beachfront when I first listened to the track. Also, fun fact, Flamingosis is the name of a freestyle frisbee move that Aaron’s dad invented back in the day (He’s the dude with the long hair in the video below, the guy with the tight fro is his uncle). They were both freestyle frisbee champs. I know right?! So cool. So with Flamingosis comes frisbee, and wow did I learn a lot about the world of freestyle frisbee working on this. (It was POPPIN OFF back in the day and frankly I’d like to get back to that) Anyway, here’s a couple clips I put together of the general vibe that was knocking around in my head.
I always start with a bunch of rough stream-of-consciousness doodles in my trusty field notes, then move onto boards in procreate.
Illustration
I did all the illustration for the piece in procreate. I wanted to evoke that funky 80’s vibe, so a lot of vibrant pinks and greens and warm tones, and nice soft washes of color. Here’s some timelapses.
Animation
Cel, AE, and 3D were all blended together in this piece. Here’s some breakdowns and highlights on some of the animation and whatnot
Ryan Boyes animated the above frisbee catch shot. I sent him the reference footage, but wanted the camera to be lower and looking up, instead of above and looking down. I asked him if he could possible do some roughs with those tweaks that I could styleframe on top of, and he totally killed it. Hire that man.
Having such great reference is pretty lit.
The feet dancing were animated by Emily Kundrot, I had none other than Mr. Flamingosis himself shoot some video of him dancing as reference.
The “infinite tunnel” sequence was handled by the incredible Julie Craft. She took my styleframes and found a way to integrate it seamlessly into 3D world with C4D/Redshift. The extra cel bits were done by Emily. Collabception.
I animated this guy in After Effects, while trying to make it look as un-aftereffects-y as possible.
As an avid bird enthusiast, it made perfect sense to have Scott Hoch animate the lovely lil Flamingos for the convertible scene. Here’s his process.
The frisbee floating scene waves were animated by Po-Chen Chia, utilizing Ordinary Folk’s wave rig. He also did a whole bunch of wizardry and After-Effects’d the shit out of this scene to make these waves move so pretty. I did the frisbee in c4d, and Issey Roquet chipped in with the flowers and floaty blobs.
Isn’t this stuff just the coolest? Julie is a wizard. YER A WIZARD JULIE.