Awe sorry that you lost all that work, that sucks. Yeah the one thing you never think about when you watch a music video, is editing it and having to listen to the song a billion times. Granted, I actually came to enjoy this song more as I worked out some of the kinks but, I will say I'll be listening to more Cosmo Shelldrake today lol.
Not much to say this time, more viewer feedback than animation. This is a big improvement compared to last time though I still have some input.
1:Great to have more colour in here but maybe stick to small palette, especially in the end because it feels like a rainbow entered the frame. Colours are connected to emotion, so having green and red at 2:39 really only makes me think of christmas.
2: Transitions, drop them. Transitions aren't used in typical film/movies unless its like a dissolve to show time has passed. So by over using the mosaic transition/slide wipe brings the viewer out of the video they're watching and to put it bluntly.....it looks amateurish, like 2009 youtube you know?
3: Reusing drawings, I noticed that in the later part of the video some of the drawings were reused. And I feel it doesn't add to it, it feels like you're just filling time till the end of the video. So I would suggest either draw new stuff instead of reusing, or spend more time on those particular drawings/animation as they are on screen longer compared to the others.
4:Still feels like a slide show, animatics are used for timing and movement. Which is important when its timed to music. Because your characters don't move a lot, it feels confusing. Meaning, at the beginning where the guy gets tripped over. We don't see him walking, no hint that he is and suddenly he's falling. You cut to a close up and it just looks like the guy is staring at the wall. More drawings are needed if you want to show movement.
. I noticed you timed some of the characters popping in with the music but that's about it
5:work on poses that linger on screen, when you animate you want to know where you're going. So the last frame is important, make sure it is clear and interesting.
Huzzah! I thought I'd see you in here. 
I tried to stick to primarily gray scale and five colors (just so I didn't get some horrible wash out) and essentially wanted to communicate the takeover with the use of those colors in the last frame. It is a bit jarring to see a rush of color pop out of nowhere in the end there though, I admit. I was thinking "red with anger, green with envy" didn't even think about the christmas-y look haha.
2009 youtube, now there's something I haven't thought about in years lol. Yeah I can't say I'm happy with the transitions that I did use. I need to come up with conjunction animations at some point.
Yeah I did reuse some frames for the pops when others didn't work out as well as I'd hoped they would. I scrapped a few that...really looked awful at the last minute.
I seem to have some issues with expressing motion in these things (and I hope to add in more environments as I go along to my next project). Whenever I get time to work on another animatic I'm going to spend some time in a motion course first.
Thanks again for dropping in. This stuff really helps as I try to develop a working modus. 
Oh! And if you've made any animatics or animations I'd love to check them out, you seem to really know your stuff so, I'd love it if you threw down some links if you do animation thingies!
It's beautiful art wise! The colors really pop and you make the characters stay consistent! However, in story telling you still lack in some areas. Like, why did the guy suddenly trip him? It would make more sense to show him walking then get tripped. Also, where did the shadow come from? Maybe a slide of it materializing? I guess what I'm trying to say is work on transitions, they're very important if you want to get the bigger picture. But other than those petty things, great animatic! You're down a good path, keep it up!
Okay, first... it DOES feel like a slideshow, mainly because of all those transitions. I do agree, it makes the entire look of it really cheap, like I sighed pretty loudly at the first transition. But even if the transitions were not there I would still get a slide-show feel out of it because of your lack of movement. Everything looks pretty static so I don't know what the characters are supposed to be doing, I can GUESS at their actions but I am not certain and that can create confusion. The segment from 0:46 to 0:56 could be greatly improved if you created a panning effect to make the people seem like they're walking or the black character seem like it's walking through a crowd of people However the segment from 1:44 to 1:47 is REALLY good and I think the most successful out of this entire video.
Moving on to the main character of this video. I feel like there is SO MUCH wasted potential! He's supposed to be a shadow/smoke/slime monster, right? Why not go ALL out and play with that? He feels very static and boring through out and that's the last thing you want to do: make your main subject boring. The segment from 1:05 to 1:08 is what I would like to see more of through out the video, more smokey movement! When you create a character that is pretty much amorphous you can do ANYTHING and you didn't, you played it too safe. In the 1:22 to 1:26 segment you could have spent less time rendering the girls and more time adding frames of these smoke monsters wrapping around them, smoke is not difficult to animate since it doesn't have a defined shape, as long as you closely follow the frame before it's not going to look too weird if something is not in the correct place.
Colors are a bit... distracting, specially at the end. Like I get these monsters are based on colors for emotions but I think it would be better if you just added black silhouettes with that one colored eyed instead of these color blobs, since in your same animation this thing infects everyone and they become black with one colored eye, this way they can also look more uniform like an army serving this one way, which I think it was what you were going for. It just felt weird and out of place, it really took me out of it seeing this rainbow in this dark tone animatic.
I think I told you in the last post, but you NEED to story board these things better, much more as a beginner so you can have a precise idea of what it is you're doing and where you are going and don't get stuck repeating frames. Even if it's just writing a loose timeline, like, from 0:00 to 0:10 this is going to happen, from 0:10 to 0:12 I want this and then this transition, you know? It doesn't have to be super technical but have something of a guide to help you out.
I attached some animatics that use black smoke monsters and an actual scene from a movie with a smoke monster so you can see what I am talking about not having these static blocky black shapes in your future projects. They all have some sort of texture or movement that makes them interesting. Also! A good thing to do is go on YouTube and SLOW DOWN videos so you can see animations better, you don't see it frame by frame but it gives you a better understanding of how things are created.
And because you asked, here's my first ever animation/animatic... I never finished because my professor was terrible and she never gave us time to work on it during class and with all my other classes it was just... really hard getting everything I wanted to put in here finished so I padded it with video alluding to what I wanted to do. This is from a comic I'm writing about witches and I wanted there to be spells and fights and an overall spooky sense over it. Anyway, I have worked on some other stuff but I never uploaded it anywhere so I don't have links.
Yeah it makes sense, transitions seem to be my weakest area so I know I'll have to work a lot on those (that and motion/environment). I'm glad I was able to keep the characters on model for the most part, which is another thing I've struggled with in the past lol. Ah, each project I learn new things. Thank you so much! All the feedback I've been getting is a great help.
Hah damn you're miles ahead of me in terms of skill I gotta say, and your creation of movement is something to behold, very smooth!
I didn't really do much with the smokey character (as far as I can tell the squips are some kind of hallucination so, really they can be anything, which in turn can make that more the pity in that regard, because there's more that can be done with them) and alas, I don't think I'm at a skill level yet where I have the chops to make anything sharp. The whole thing is definitely a work in progress for me, though I hope as I continue I can keep getting closer to my goal of having something smooth that's easily palatable (and a better color scheme or lack thereof lol though I know I don't have the chops to animate anything in full color hahaha).
Yeah I get rather stuck when it comes to transitions and motions. I'm not much of an animator at all so it's been quite a learning curve for me, and I realized how difficult they were going to be when I tried to edit them together. I've rotoscoped (very roughly) before for my friends' youtube channel with some success, but it's effectively cheating because I had Cab Calloway to base a poses off of when drew it so, doing these things without a reference as solid as Cab is proving to be a challenge for me. I think I was pretty ambitious with this one and should work on a smaller project in terms of length in future. I've never been to school for art or anything like that so, alas I don't know much about the deadlines but, I'd still be pretty pissed if my instructor didn't give me enough time for a project. By the way, thank you so much for more sources, these are a great help (and who doesn't love Hexxus-Curry? The stuff the animators did with that character is just gorgeous) as I keep figuring out how to get these key frames right. I've rather enjoyed the Heathers animatics overall, lots of artists out there who are able to get beautiful motion down).
I appreciate your time J.Z. Castillo, I know I'm slow to pick up some of the tricks but, I hope I'll be able to do better with each creation. I'll keep up with these sources and I hope I can make something you'll enjoy.
No problem, was lucky actually as I dont frequent the forums a lot these days. Best advice is still practise, which you're still doing so that's good. Oh boy, my animations/animatics oof...I may know some stuff but that comes from my failures hehe. Besides they weren't made for showing others so the arts terrible! But if you really want to see an example of what not to do sure I'll give out a couple.
Hahah hoooo boy do I need the practice! XD Honestly failure is the best teacher, when you fail you can improve on what came before so, I like to think of failure as a sort of inspiration as well (even when it sucks haha). Awe I'm sure they're not all that bad! I'd love to see them.
haha yeah, I didn't know the shortcut to slowing down the video, it's pretty much the same thing.
@SynCypher definitely try to take on smaller projects, something like 0:30 videos. one thing that helps is finding a small piece of audio and making small animations about it. I find that it really helps out when you actually have a narrative laid out for you rather than coming up with one on your own when you are just learning
Yeah that definitely makes sense. I think I'd rather enjoy a shorter project at this point, I'd like to go back to some figure drawing studies as well so I can brush up on body language, rather than the stiff figures I had in this one. A smaller project would benefit from something like that, I think.
its not a shortcut to slowing down, if you pause the video then press the keys < and > you can go through it frame by frame and back a frame much more useful than slowing down I would say.
oh really? it didn't work for me... maybe because I was using it here instead of the actual site, I'll try it out!
I use chrome... but I click Shift+> or < for it to work and that just speeds up or slows down the video
I use chrome too, odd....you dont press shift for frame by frame. All I can say is here is what google says when you ask it.
Pause the video. Press . to go one frame forward. , to go one frame back.To move forward a few frames on Youtube, pause the video and then use J or L to go backward or forward respectively.
hope that helps, otherwise no big deal.
