The Color Canvas - DOWN animation

(Establishing shot, from the animation DOWN by The Color Canvas - all artwork/animation © richard collingridge)

Hi All, after a couple of years break from blogger, I decided perhaps it was a good idea to start using it again because I'd like to start showing more work which fits a little bit outside my standard illustration stuff, and more into creative direction/animation etc. hope you enjoy.

I've been looking forward to putting this out for a while now. I was asked to do a 4 minute music video for a band, I'd previously done album artwork for this band (called 'The Color Canvas'). The goal was to create something that looked as close to studio quality as possible with minimal man power (i.e. only me) & in the minimal amount of time. Normally an animated video of this length would be around 3 months work for a studio, where you may have around 10 people working on the project at once. I didn't have that luxury, so had to look at ways around this issue. 

(shot from the animation DOWN by The Color Canvas - all artwork/animation © richard collingridge)

On the one hand, I looked into short hand animations and the Cartoon Network style stuff from the 90s, especially Samurai Jack as they made a lot of different shortcuts to produce the cartoon more quickly. and on the other hand, I had a lot of album artwork I'd done for the band previously, so I thought if I adapted those artworks it would save me time on doing full blown matte paintings from scratch. In the end, it was a bit of a combination of these two things, plus a lot of animation looping, and some SFX produced in After effects.

(animation process - all artwork/animation © richard collingridge)

As alluded to above the Animation was produced using a few different tricks, but a big part was hand drawn, then digitally painted frames. I would usually start off in Clip Studio, drawing the rough animation, as clip studio is the most natural feeling drawing/painting program imo. Then move on to photoshop to ink, put together in a sequence & and add a blue screen. Then onto after effects to composite and direct the scene as a whole, sometimes adding things like camera shake, zooming, panning etc.

(a heart tree - an adaption of a previous artwork for The Colour Canvas - all artwork/animation © richard collingridge)

Because there wasn't much time, and I had already committed to using album artwork as part of the story, I had to develop a loose narrative that worked around that imagery, and do that within a day. So the story I came up with, loosely revolves around 'heart trees' from the album artwork and growth. The heart tree in the village where characters come from is destroyed, and they go on a journey through time to re-discover it.. in the end they discover a metaphorical heart tree, which leads to a kind of rebirth..(which is left mostly to our imagination) a 2001 vibe I guess.

(characters in the future, from DOWN by The Color Canvas - all artwork/animation © richard collingridge)

It took around 6 weeks to produce the whole animation in the end (so a little over 4 weeks but still good time!!). Mastered in true HD, (4k still a little too much for my computer to handle!)  I think all of the shots bar maybe one, looked studio standard and I'm very happy (and I'm never usually happy at the end of a project!) with what I managed to produce in the allotted time with the resources/time available. 

You can watch the video here:




cheers Rich :)