I critique my own work! Owl City Unbelievable Music Video

Today I'm going to be critiquing my own work. This is an oldie but a goodie from 2015. This is Owl City's Unbelievable animated music video. When Universal Music reached out to me with Owl City's song, they didn't know what to do with the video, and I I really like to start there with a blank sheet of paper, complete urgency, a few weeks to get it done. So I got to work. So the week I started production on this video, I had to go to a wedding in Chicago. I locked myself in a boardroom, a bottle of water, and a Muji notebook, and that was it. Listening to the song and just taking any visions in my head and putting them into that Muji notebook. I started to sketch out things like an Etch-a-Sketch, the Hanson characters, Adam Young from Owl City, but I didn't have the big idea. I couldn't crack it. And then I just started focusing on nostalgia. That's what the lyrics are all about. That's what I wanted to inject into this video. Anyways, I put my pen to paper and I just kept drawing and drawing, and then all of a sudden this character popped up, a VHS tape. And when I thought about that, I thought that that would be the ending to the video. This VHS tape would slap a sticker on itself and it would say, "Be kind, rewind." Now once I saw that ending, I could go back to the beginning and know that my character is going to start there. They're going to jump into the VHS tape to play back all the memories from the 1990s and show all that nostalgic gear. This is what basement in the 1990s looked like. One of these old TV sets that used to have to slam to get a picture to work, a VCR playing on top of it. For the graphics on this, I really just Googled 1990s graphics and borrowed a bunch of gradients. So I sort of connected that to cheesier, crappier animation, which I loved in the early '90s, and brought it into this video. The way to speed up the animation process is to reuse graphics. So this character pose shows up later on in the video when the character pops out of their french fries. I screenshotted that and brought it to the beginning and then created this animated text underneath Reuse animations and graphics anywhere you can, all the time. Kids these days will never know about having to turn this knob on the TV and having only a few stations to watch. They have it way too easy. These are static PSDs. This frame is a Photoshop file. This character is designed in Adobe Animate, and all you do is set them up in Z-space and you fly a camera through each one so you can fly through that triangle and go to the next character. I won't go through all the nostalgic details in here, but I definitely wanted to do a piggy bank and Mentos, putting that in Pepsi. We're just going to transition smoothly from this piggy bank to that bus scene where the soda spills or flies all over the place. So, since we are critiquing my old work, the background doesn't have much detail here. That could use more detail. We could run from a background hill to a foreground hill. Let's do a quick scene breakdown here. The VHS character, this is all designed in Adobe Animate. That background was designed in Photoshop at the time and then it's all composited in After Effects. You can have a camera move in and out which creates a little bit of depth and a little bit more movement. So, this This scene is just very simply blending the hundreds of cans of SpaghettiOs that I ate with the hours and hours of laser tag I played as a kid. I felt like that had to be in this video. When Adam Young says, "When I was a kid, I spent my Saturdays blowing on Nintendo games," you can't put anything else visually on screen other than this character blowing on Nintendo games. So we go from blowing on Nintendo games to The Lion King. The VHS tape is holding the Nintendo controller. To design these backgrounds, I looked at all the Lion King backgrounds and I just made very simple versions of them. A dark purple and you slap a bright pink over top of it for the highlights here, and you don't have to add insane amount of details because we're not going to be zooming out here or zooming in. Alright, back to that critiquing. I get a little cringe at these scenes. I've sort of made fun of myself just with these simple movements of the characters playing the keyboard or the guitar like this. Still works, but would have done it differently if I could go back. So, that's an Adobe Animate SWF file on top, That pyramid is a Photoshop file brought into After Effects with some glow added onto it. The camera is circling around overhead. In most of my videos, you're going to find Buffalo Bills memorabilia, clothing. I had to put this character walking in the snow with a Buffalo Bills hat on. I'm pretty happy with these shots. This VHS tape playing different roles in movies like Rambo or those movies where like an action hero would like throw a match and then walk away from the explosion like it doesn't even affect them in the background. And then we tie it all together with a little MC Hammer dance move. Correction, it was Vanilla Ice dance move. So with the backgrounds, I just did very simple line drawings, rough paint underneath. I didn't even fill it in all perfectly. I wanted to look very rough and vintagey. I added a number like this was being filmed on a camcorder. Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I had to put the unbelievable license plate on this. Couple quick cuts to set up this Fresh Prince of Bel-Air scene where the VHS tape is gonna hop in the cab. So I just packed this part with every nostalgic item I could think of. The Etch-A-Sketch, juice boxes, balloons, McDonald's french fries. Here's some keyboard scenes. Back to reusing those cheesy graphics. The big bold band name with the keytar. And now Adam Young is gonna close his eyes and think back on the Magic 8 Ball. Let me quickly educate you on all of these nostalgic items in this scene. Cassette tape. Before the CD. You probably don't even know what a CD is. This is a stack of paper. These perforations on the side, this is how you used to have to print paper. The ThighMaster. One of the most important inventions of the 20th century. There's only one way to cut peanut butter and jelly, and that is in perfect squares. You can't cut it diagonally or it tastes totally different. Umbro shorts. Super Soakers. I don't need to say anything about those. Your first pair of Rollerblades probably had like bright green wheels with a brake on it and like a purple interior. Snap bracelets. Slurpees that you ate using a pretzel rod. You haven't lived until you've gone on a 24-hour road trip in a minivan with this wood panel. Earbuds? No, no, no, we don't do earbuds. We do giant yellow Walkmen with headphones that go over your ears, slime, Nickelodeon slime that was everywhere, Lunchables, black couch, very important. Yeah, at the end of videos I always have this problem of not knowing how to recap everything. For this, I was just like, these were all really cool and funny, let me create some sort of grid here with bright colors behind it. And now we're returning to the normal world. Be kind, rewind, and that's a wrap. So I think it's physically impossible to critique your own work and not think that there's something you could have done different or better, but looking back at it, I'm nostalgic about the nostalgia in this video, and I feel like we started off with a blank sheet of paper. My client didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do. All I knew is I was going to get it to this finish line. I ended up doing that. This video ended up getting 10 million views. My client was pretty happy with it. I had a great time making it, and I can look back at it and think that I came up with some pretty decent ideas for it. But I'm gonna get back to the drawing board and keep improving my skills. I appreciate you sticking around for this. If you have any questions about how I made this, any of the tools, story writing techniques, anything like that, drop your question in the comments. I try to respond to every single one. Thank you very much for watching, and I will see you next time.