My Monster

A couple months back I put together this demo video for the song "Sickness" by my pal Mike Shockey's band My Monster:



I had a hell of a time getting a version online without shredding the image quality. This version's - nyeagh, it's adequate. But I was going for a very precise visual feel.

See, my original thought was to create a rotoscope-animated video of "Sickness". I tested the Photoshop effects in the clip above as an alternative to that. Rotoscoping is pretty laborious, you know: each minute of A Scanner Darkly (for instance) took 500 animator-hours to trace and color. At that rate, a 4-minute music video would take a guy a 40-hour-a-week year to finish.

This (greatly-crappier-than-A-Scanner-Darkly) rotoscope test, depicting Michael Shockey as a rockstar, took me one long night to make:

Here's a flashy version of the same test.

So - there are some interesting possibilities here....

Parting thought: if a full "Sickness" video were made - and it's a great song, by the way, deserving of the effort - I think a combination of the two styles may work best (Photoshopping + some rotoscoping). You can catch a hint of that in this clip, which shows original video with overlaid tracing and coloring.