This project was done back in 2020 for the aptly named and newly released album by The Strokes called The New Abnormal... which all of us on the animation team thought was fitting considering the situation in the world at the time. 

I was hired by Brian Covalt at Moving Colour to work with Director Warren Fu to animate two chapters of this video. Chapter 2: Street & Chapter 6: Speakeasy. Chapter 6 was pretty straight forward, so I'll focus most of the breakdown on Chapter 2 which required multiple techniques to accomplish.

I thought it'd be helpful to include one of the early pass animatics in this to show how basic things are in the beginning stages of a shot. You're mostly trying to block out the scene, establish the camera move... asking questions like "does the pacing feel good with the tempo of the music?" That sort of thing. You definitely want to get buy off from the director before adding any detail.

This version of the animatic is much farther along. The camera has been locked and now it's about set dressing and hitting the appropriate beats. Sometimes I'd move an object back and forth in z-space so that it would break the frame of the camera on a specific beat in the song. I think I may have picked this up after doing something like a million concert visuals or something.

One technical obstacle on this project was creating a seamless handoff point between myself and the other artists working on the A and B side shots. Hence the thick foliage on the front end.

The visual target Warren wanted me to hit was something like the illustration work of Moebius, but leaning much more into the look and feel of Ralph Bakshi's rotoscoping work from the 70s & 80s.

I ended up using Octane to render the front end, Redshift for the cell shading and sketch and toon for the line work.