From Sketch to the Final Product: How the Brittle Bones Nicky Video Was Made

Do you ever wonder how an animated music video is made?

Creating an animated music video is a ton of work! From hours and hours of writing and producing the song, through the animation process, all the way to the final product, the whole thing can take months (or even a year) to complete.

For Rare Americans, the process usually goes like this:

1. write a song

2. record a song

3. come up with a video concept

4. explain video concept to animators

5. receive an animatic from animators

6. approve animatic (or request changes)

7. receive final video

8. Come up with a marketing plan

9. Release song and video

There’s a lot more that goes into this, but that’s how it looks in it’s simplest form. I think most people are somewhat familiar with the songwriting process (we can post more about ours later), but when it comes to animation, people usually don’t know much about it.

To help understand what goes on in the early days of producing a music video, let’s talk about “ANIMATICS”.

Animatics

An animatic is like a rough draft of an animation scene or sequence. It's made up of a bunch of storyboard sketches that are put together with audio and sometimes basic movement. The purpose of an animatic is to help animators (in this case, our wonderful team at Crooked City Studios - Formerly known as Solis Animation) and directors plan out the timing and composition of the scene before actually doing the full animation.

Basically, it's a way to make sure everything is working before committing to the more time-consuming and expensive process of creating the final animation. Animatics are also useful for communicating ideas and progress to other members of the production team.

Once the animatic is approved, the animators can use it as a guide to create the final animation. This helps save time and resources by avoiding major changes later on in the process. So, in short, animatics are an important tool in the animation process that helps make sure everything looks and feels just right before the final product is completed.

Brittle Bones Nicky Animatic

If you watch the video above, you get the “bones” of the Brittle Bones Nicky music video in its animatic form. You can see that most of the ideas from the animatic stayed for the final product.

As a bonus, you get to hear what the original demo of the song sounded like.

Solis Animation did a wonderful job with the video, and obviously it was a huge success for us. It’s really fun to look back on these types of things and learn how everything start.

Did you dig this post? If so, put a comment below and we’ll post more of these animatics. Let us know what video you’d like to see next