Smashbits #21: Overwatch Music Video - "One Of A Kind" -RELEASED ANIMATION-

WOW, busy night for released Overwatch animations, huh?  I just found out the client released this on April Fool's Day!  That certainly helps explain why it's so goofy.  I hope you enjoy, I'm excited to finally start showing this thing to people!

Behind the Scenes: 

Near the end of January, Smashbits asked me to do this and it was my highest budget freelance project so far!  However I only had 8 weeks to do it so it was quite a bit of stress.  That's not a lot of time to design so many detailed characters, make an animatic, make all the backgrounds and animate all the characters and props.  Throughout the production, Smashbits was on my back about how the client would not give us any deadline extensions.  It was a hell of a time, but I must say I'm really proud of the results! It had been far too long since I animated something so traditionally and I impressed myself so I feel good. I hope you guys enjoy it, it's a lot more complicated to make than it looks, haha!

Erica Lordi (my wife) deserves a lot of credit on this cartoon!  After I finished the first four shots, I stopped coloring and focused just on finishing animation.  From that point on, Erica colored every frame of every character and most weapons, with just a handful of stray details that I colored myself (usually just props).   She even colored the lip sync, which is a whole other step!

Production went right down to the final hours of the deadline, and it ended with us staying up all night on a Saturday until 3pm the next day.  Erica and I slept in 4 hour shifts to trade off on the animation and coloring stages and managed to get it done on time!  Theeeeennn, Smashbits didn't reply for two days and when I finally asked them if they gave it to the client, they told me they didn't because of a moving emergency... so apparently THEY could have emergency deadline extensions but not the people doing the work, who didn't have any free time for 8 weeks.  Sadly, that's typical of the animation industry.  That delayed the client from asking for corrections (although most of them were things they could've asked for earlier in production), so even though we worked ourselves to death so that they could release it in March, they ended up releasing it for April Fool's Day.