As you can see my sketchbook is very stream of conscious and rough. I like to spend the majority of my time actually developing the art and animation. I use my sketches as a quick way to just put my ideas on paper. I did everything from research about chameleons to looking at all shapes and sizes of the species. Once I had these things locked down I went into creating my characters and assets. I knew I wanted the look to be vibrant and alive to match the emotion of the song, so instead of using a clean vector look in Illustrator, I decided to use hand drawn elements in Photoshop to give everything a much more textural feeling.
Now that my assets were created, I was free to bring everything into After Effects and just get down to the nitty gritty of rigging and animating. When rigging characters I use a program called Duik. This is a free program that works great with setting up character rigs within After Effects. All you have to do is label and parent your elements properly and you have a working character rig within minutes.
It's a little challenging showing all the layers in one shot, but this is what the set up looks like after the rigging is done and Duik has performed it's magic. Basically I get a set of about 8 controls that let me easily manipulate the character in a way that makes sense. Once this is complete with all the various characters I do all my animating. After many hours and hundreds of keyframes you end up with the music video you see below. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it!
