Inktober 2019

Videos
Animator
After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator

The Inktober hype that went around my design friends had me motivated to give it a try as well. I always thought it was only for illustrators, but I was assured that I could express myself through any medium. With that, I opted to try “Ink”tober but with animation. To help narrow the scope, I decided that I would animate album covers set to songs from the albums. It would lighten the workload, since most of the visuals were set, and allow me to focus on the movement of the elements in the covers.

Day 1 - Ring

Album: Orikami & Dreams Compilation
Song: Discandy - In Love Again

The first day was a strong start. I had good energy, and the idea was fairly clear in my head. I decided I would follow the 2019 Inktober prompts. The rings on the planet were a good match to the first prompt. The planet with the swirling atmosphere was difficult to recreate faithfully so I created my own interpretation with fractal noise and turbulent displace effects. The first day was also the day to temper my enthusiasm by showing how even simple ideas can take a surprising amount of time. I decided to make an animation every few days instead.

Day 3 - Bait

Album: Ikigai
Song: afternoon x halberd - pixel dreams

Bait makes me think of fish. The slight pixelation effect on the album reminded me of the pixel sorting effects my friend had applied to a video of his. I borrowed the plugin he had used, and after much struggling, I got pretty close to the desired outcome. I still don’t fully understand how the plugin works...

Day 5 - Build

Album: 20 Years Dead Metropolis - The Compilation Pt​​.​​2 - 2005 - 2018
Song: Angel Dust - Last Breath

Not my favourite album, but the cover really grabbed my attention (what isn’t cool about a DJ mech?). To have it match the prompt, I decided I would have the mech build up from parts and then come to life. This is also the first video where I considered things like intros and scene transitions. Time to build the mech in required a quiet point in the music, and that meant I needed something else in the scene during the build up period. I had plans to make more moving parts such as having the turntable spin, and the sliders move up and down, but I needed to push the animation out the door.

Day 7 - Enchanted

Album: Neon Impasse
Song: City Girl - Ji-eun's Sunset

This is an animation I was very pleased with. It came out looking a lot like what I had in my head, and I was very happy with how well the frame-by-frame aesthetic worked out. I would have liked to have more moving elements like the girl’s hair and the plants swaying in the breeze, but I did not have the time to redraw the overlapping elements.

Day 10 - Pattern

Album: Origin
Song: Vanilla - Sunrise

Despite having done only 3 animations, I was already feeling the burnout from working on these on top of my 8 hour work day. This one was an easy one to give me a small breather while still working on Inktober.

Day 14 - Overgrown

Album: Compass
Song: DJ Okawari - Starry Sky

The original plan here was to have all the plants grow in, and have the various particles and leaves fly by. Of course, after day 7, I realized how much work that was and had to adjust the idea a bit. I continued cutting bits out in Photoshop, determining what were foreground and background elements. The intention was to allow particles to weave in and out of elements and give a sense of depth, but the execution turned out more subtle than I wanted.

Day 18 - Misfit

Album: Eureka
Song: Kubix - Eureka

I’d say day 18 was the most disappointing one I made. The green trail effect did not turn out like the one in the TV show (Eureka Seven), and it was a bit naive of me to assume it was possible to recreate through a few effects combined.

Day 26 - Dark

Album: Emulation
Song: Mefjus - Hybrid

“Dark” was more directed at the song than the album art. Initial plans to animate the roots growing out into the techy lines were quickly scrapped due to time constraints, and the whole animation was a lot of copy-pasting of effects and keyframes. Much of the work went into tweaking timing to give a sense of chaos and randomness.

Day 31 - Last

Album: Neoncity Cruise
Song: マクロスMACROSS 82-99 - Big City Nights

For the last one, I didn’t follow the prompt because this was a cover I really wanted to do. It was also the one I had the most fun working on. Figuring out the lighting effects on the various elements of the illustration was an interesting challenge and I am really pleased with the final product.

Reflection

Overall, I was surprised that I made it all the way to the end of the month; many of my friends ended up dropping out after the first week. It was good to know that I could commit to something like this if I set my mind to it. Moving forward, I should be much better about setting expectations and pacing myself to prevent burnout.