MUSIC VIDEO WITH PAUL ROBINSON

Today's lecture was extremely insightful. Adelina brought a guest speaker in the team's session who is a professional in the music industry: Paul Robinson (producer and composer). The subject he discussed was regarding animation for music videos. As he pointed out, animating a music video is something any animators end up doing at some point in their career. To give us a general idea on the subject he showed some iconic samples from the past. For instance, he mentioned Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel (stop-motion technique), Take on Me by A-ha (a mixture between 2D animation and live-action filming, Rotoscoping technique), Lake Tahoe by Kate Bush (using shadow puppetry and stop-motion) and others, and all the inspirations behind them.

This quick look at past music video was extremely entertaining because it reminded me of how I used to watch them all as a child and be in love with their aesthetics, especially with the Take on Me music video. What was really interesting about this lecture was understanding more about how music and pictures can work together. But, as a matter of facts, does the music follow the video or vice-versa? This question Paul asked us made me reflect. My first instinct told me that music does follow the image, however, after some consideration I came to the conclusion that it can work both ways around. For instance, as I am writing this post I am also listening to some calm music (in the background) and it is helping me to focus. But as soon as I focus exclusively on the music I can picture some visuals that could possibly describe the sounds. Hence, the music is inspiring me to visualise what I am hearing. This is something I never really paid attention to but that would be extremely interesting to explore more.

Adelina then talked us through her experience collaborating with Paul for one of her animations. They worked together throughout the whole process, together they decided which colour to base the animation on and thanks to her storyboards they knew exactly what sounds to use at the right moment. The end result was stunning and it made me realise how important is using the right sound whilst animating. Recently I had the opportunity to design an animation, and I have to admit that finding the perfect audio to back it up was not easy. However, I was extremely pleased with the song I chose for my short animation (based on Euphoria, 2019). The song was somehow complementing the visuals and despite being out of sync in some frames I believe worked fine in the end. CLICK HERE to have a look at my animation.