Hey, you ask and I deliver. This is Scribble Kibble! A weekly show about animations made
by a silly animator.
This week I’ve decided to give in to peer pressure and disassemble the animation “Die
Young” by VivziePop. It’s a good animation. If you’ve been avoiding it because of the
song or because of the - well - the furries, steel yourself and just watch the video so
we can move on.
I think I saw this about a year ago when it first came out and I had two reactions: jealousy
because of the fluid, lively frame-by-frame drawings, and disappointment because of the
song choice. Not because the song irritates me or anything, but because I knew the video
would get hit with copyright strikes pretty much as soon as it came out.
And that’s exactly what happened. The animation got removed as its popularity soared. But
surprisingly this wasn’t because the record label said no, it was because someone filed
a fake copyright claim on the video. Basically, if someone on the internet doesn’t like
a YouTube video, they can make a fake account and file copyright strikes on the video in
order to get it removed.
Yes it’s messed up. No, there's nothing we can do about it.
The animation you just saw was removed, and everyone had to watch it on Vimeo while waiting
for YouTube to respond to the fake claim. It’s up now of course but I’m surprised
since then it that hasn’t been flagged by the actual owners of the song and covered
with advertisements.
In other words, if you are an animator
please
PLEASE
use some of the great original music that won't get you into trouble, and that won’t
make money for other people.
VivziePop and the other artists who made the Die Young animation spent hundreds of hours
- easily thousands of dollars worth of their time - making this. It drives me nuts when
I see music companies claim fan animations and make advertising revenue off of the insane
amount of time animators spend.
Of course the music company has every legal right to do this, since you are basically
stealing their work, but
Just- ugh-
let’s talk about the artwork.
So the thing that stands out to me the most about VivziePop's art is that she is a fantastic
character designer. You can flip through her comic Zoophobia or the thumbnail grid on her
YouTube channel and you will see what I am talking about because e character has a unique
shape and an appealing color scheme. You can tell what the character’s personality is
just by looking at them.
And of course the character in Die Young is no exception. Her base colors of blue, blue,
and blue would be really plain except for her red outfit, which is what makes the design
pop. If the overalls were just more blue or a color close to blue, like purple, it wouldn’t
stand out. And then after the blue and the red, the bits of gold accent the scheme. And
that’s it: three base colors. If it were more than that it would be too much. Like
if her eyes were green. That's just too much. Too many different colors not working together
in that situation.
The character also has a strand of purple in her hair to define the bangs. Without the
purple her hair would just be a big poof.
Overall this character design is too complicated for the average animation. Every earring,
the gold tooth, all of these freckles, the white stripes on the ear tips, and the stripes
on the stocking have to be carefully placed and redrawn every single time. So seeing the
character move the way it does with all of this stuff on it is even more impressive.
Really. I don’t know how she keeps track of all these details.
Moving on to the animation process, the animation is drawn in a program we haven’t seen yet:
TV Paint. I haven’t used this software myself, but I do know it is good for animations with
more details and textures. It's kind of like animating in Photoshop. If you want to see
what TV Paint can do, watch the movie Song of the Sea. And if you want to see what VivziePop’s
animation process looks like, you can watch this video of hers. To sum up the process
for Die Young, she starts with rough sketches of the motion. Then she draws the final line
art over those sketches and deletes the sketches, colors every drawing in SAI Paint Tool, flips
back to TV Paint and adds the shine to the overall buttons and jewelry, paints shading
over each frame, and adds details like the white stripes to the ear tips.
So the base coloring is done in SAI and then all of the details are added later in TV Paint.
And that's what TV Paint is really good at: painting over your drawings like that.
I’m a bit curious about the guest animators and the colorist mentioned at the end of the
video. I bet we can go through and try to pick out what they did. So... lineless background
characters here. These two cats here. Vivzie here is drawing the main character in this
scene but probably not these lineless side characters.
Although overall I’m going to say most of this is animated by Vivziepop. Otherwise we
would proooobably notice. Not because any particular animator is better than the other,
but because it takes a great deal of skill to perfectly copy another animator's style.
Well, that ends the insight I wish to share on this animation. VivziePop is an independent
animator with a degree from the School for Visual Arts in New York City. You can find
links to her animations and all of that below.
Thanks for watching this episode of Scribble Kibble! The next episode is going to be a
guest episode and it's going take me a bit longer to make. I hope you’ll be back for
it in two weeks. Bye for now!