Over the past six months I've released two satirical videos about the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and his government in general. The videos have done much better than expected (~two million views between them), and since they were both created with Anime Studio, I thought I'd share them here.
I'm not posting these to provoke any sort of political debate on these forums. If you want to do that, please feel free to message me or head to the awful YouTube comments section
Here are the links. Keep in mind that almost every scene is a satirical reference to something the government has said or done, so without following Australian politics, this may result in a "wtf did I just watch
?!" reaction. --
#1 - parody of Miley Cyrus "Wrecking Ball" (posted Dec 2013, using Anime Studio 8 )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxq__3z9zGM
#2 - parody of Pharrell Williams "Happy" (posted May 2014, using Anime Studio 10)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1ggMgjYev4
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Notes about the animation:
[Wrecking ball]
- I wish I knew how to write scripts to assist with some tasks: having to manually "break up" large shapes in order to have them fall apart was a bit annoying. Take the scene with the collapsing wind farm for example. In order to smash each turbine, I had to create a bunch of smaller shapes (pieces) from within the original shape (full turbine), so that when the ball hits them, they'd break up. Pretty sure I had to put each of them on their own layer, too - otherwise the physics engine would treat them all as one object. What would be awesome would be a script which could automatically handle this: once you select the shape & activate the script, it breaks the shape into pieces which are then spread over different layers if required so that they could be smashed
- One of the last scenes where Tony is riding the treasurer like a cash piñata was animated in AS but was finished with After Effects so I could have a custom particle system for the money. In the AS scene, I rendered the characters & background out as one file, then a separate output of just a bright green sphere (a layer in the treasurer character skeleton) where I wanted the cash to fall from. Then used motion-tracking in AE to track the sphere, then made the particle system follow the tracked movements. This scene looks terrible on YouTube thanks to over-compression: there are a lot of cash particles :\
[Happy] - Most references in this video are in relation to the government's Budget, announced 2 weeks before this video was released (took 2 weeks to put together).
- THIS IS WHEN I FINALLY BOUGHT ANIME STUDIO 10 AND OH MAN I LOVE TARGET BONES SO MUCH!!!@(*!&(@#(*(@*### *takes deep breath*
Sooo this was my first animation in years where I'd actually rigged characters properly. I still have a lot to learn, but this animation was a good learning curve. The second scene (our immigration minister dancing awfully & giving the finger to asylum seekers) was the first thing I've animated using target bones.
- The blonde woman stealing aid from african kids is our foreign minister, and here's her famous death-stare in reality: http://valuesaustralia.com/blog/wp-cont ... _stare.jpg
- The bowling alley scene isn't a political reference. It's a parody of a creepy scene in the original "Happy" video. The guy in the schoolboy outfit is our education minister, Christopher Pyne: http://static.theglobalmail.org/cache/a ... 37feda.jpg- an odd little man & the perfect cartoon character.
- The scene where Tony is dancing on the desk in parliament with his party members behind him is a reference to the original "Happy" video, seen here (starts at 2 minutes): http://youtu.be/y6Sxv-sUYtM?t=2m… for this scene, I loaded the original video into Anime Studio & frame by frame animated Tony's skeleton so he's replicating Pharrell's dance moves. I just had Tony's opacity set to half so I could see what Pharrell was doing, then moved Tony on each frame to the same pose. This was ridiculously easy to do, thanks to the awesomeness of Anime Studio!
Backgrounds were drawn & coloured in Photoshop, but several of them were sketched first in Clip Studio (Manga Studio, digital edition).
Ads play in front of each video. This isn't by choice. As soon as the videos are uploaded, YouTube identifies the copyright music used. If you accept the terms, it means ads play & the copyright holder gets any $ made from the videos. If you don't agree to the terms, the audio is removed or content is blocked.
Finally, these were both done quite quickly (both in my spare time over 2 weeks) in order to release them at relevant times. The animation could obviously be improved & I'm currently practicing more with rigging, smart bones, target bones, etc.
Thanks for watching
