Kent - Silver (OC animatic version)Noin 90 erillistä framea sisältävä Andriaana-teemainen musiikkivideo, jonka tekemiseen kului kokonaisuudessaan liki kaksi kuukautta aikaa. Pääosassa on oma hahmoni Trezésira Diora, mutta muitakin (niin omiani kuin muidenkin) hahmoja on mukana ihan kiitettävä määrä. Alkujaan Tumblriin videosta kirjoittamiani mietteitä: This thing. It’s finally finished. It took me overall nearly two months and quite a few allnighters (I’m a slow artist and I have no idea what I’m doing most of the time), but the swan song of my dying computer is now uploaded to Youtube. Am I going to ramble about it? Oh you bet I am! No need to actually read any of it though, hahah, I’m writing this mostly to amuse myself. I’ve likely said it before, but all of the characters in the video are from a forum rpg called Andriaana which has been dead for nearly a decade by now. The main character of the video, Zésira, was one of my most precious characters who went through quite a lot during those years. Her parents were such a hot mess and raised Zésira and her sister to be nothing more than weapons for their personal cause. Zésira tolerated the abuse for years until she finally got fed up enough to stand up for herself. After that she was free (or at least more free) to make new aquaintances and move on in her life. The video tells the story somewhat literally aside from some minor details. For example as a pup Zésira didn’t really run away from her parents in physical sense (her sister on the other hand did) but instead she did that more inside her head by drowning herself in the tasks given to her. Overall to me running away, or more precisely leaving, is the core theme of this video. It evolves from running away out of fear to washing your hands of something and walking away from it (what Zésira’s mom Mirada eventually does) and finally to leaving the past behind you by moving on in your life. Even besides all that this video contains A LOT more symbolism than my art usually does. Obscuring character’s face/eyes showcases authority: there are barely any shots where you can see Zésira’s father’s face clearly because he was the number one authority figure for her. Mother Mirada slowly slips to being shown more often more clearly when the video advances. “My blood is red” vs “my blood is black” is also a bit about that, but also about who is hurting in what part of the story. (Both physically and mentally.) In the beginning the pups are bleeding in red and the parents are shown in the parts of “my blood is black” while only having the red blood of their pups on their lips. In the middle part both Zésira and Mirada are bleeding in red, and finally in the end no one is physically bleeding but it’s implied that both Zésira and Ister are bleeding in black AND red. (They were both individuals who had been kicked in the head by life numerous times.) What else… Oh, of course! “Black like silver”, the chorus of the song! I’m not sure what it is supposed to mean originally, but at least in the context of this video to me it means that even things that seem very much just black or white are in reality often some shade of grey. Zésira’s life was full of misery, she grew up believing some really messed up stuff and she even did a lot of horrible things herself, but even so there were some good moments among it all. Her dreams would’ve sounded like something pretty evil to a random passerby, but on a closer inspection even they would’ve stemmed on what she believed to be for the best for everyone. So not just black, evil for the sake of evil, but grey/silver. This color theme is also reflecting to other parts of the chorus (“no one can see our colors here” etc.) but I’m sure you’ll get the gist of it already! That’s most of what I wanted to write down, but I guess I’ll also say a few words from the technical point of view, too. As I know nothing about video making I obviously had a lot of difficulties while putting all of this together. Some of them I managed to patch up, some I didn’t know how to fix and for a few I said “fuck it, I don’t care enough to do anything about it”. For example the video has black borders solely because it kept flashing some random black bars in the edges of the video, so I just hid them away, hahah. I also slapped together a really messy but working repeating tile that I used while making the forest in the beginning and end of the video. And I think it’s pretty miraculous that even if my computer was throwing me freezes and BSODs while making this I never lost more than a few brush strokes when those happened. So thank you, dear computer, for somehow struggling to the end of this stupid, horrible (affectionate) project that I wish to never repeat ever again! |