Hungover In The City of Dust Animated MV - Part 1 - Storyboards
Hi! I’m KC. I like platypi, pineapples, and Vriska(vriska).
I draw memes and comics almost every day. It's how I process and recount things. Pushing Events and Conversations that happen around me into a concise or humorous narrative. My love of sequential art fed into my interest in the movement of said pictures. Illustration and comics (static art, basically) is my main artform because I can take it with me wherever.
Terminology, What IS Animation
Animation is the process of creating the illusion of motion and change. This is achieved through the rapid display of sequential images, thus processed by the brain as a fluid motion.
A Storyboard is an organization of sequential images that help determine and lay out the groundwork from an animation. Basically what a draft is for a story. It contains all the basic info needed for production. The main things to focus on are:
Layout
Script/Dialogue
Time/Duration of each scene
Camera movement/Angles
Characters, objects, elements
Mood/emotion/action
Think about Color, if any. Side reference sheets.
But not always necessary. I’m going minimal for this.
Scenes
In film and live action, these are usually called ‘shots’. In animation, they’re called scenes, and are defined by the individual camera angle. Each time the viewpoint shifts, it’s a new scene. This doesn’t include when the camera zooms in or out though, or if it pans. Only when the entire angle is changed.
In traditional 2D Animation, each time the viewpoint, background, or camera cut changes, it’s a new scene.
Panels
A panel is a part of a shot/scene. There can be many panels in one scene but it is impossible to have 2 scenes in a panel. The panel is a component of a scene.
One panel is one drawing.
Frame Rate
The speed at which frames are played. The human eye can process 10 to 12 images in succession as individual pictures, while higher rates are perceived as movement.
Most 2D animations are made at a framerate of 24 FPS. This is what I’m doing.
Frames
A Frame is one of the still rendered images that make up a video. One Panel can be from one to multiple frames. It is the duration. Showing a panel for 24 frames is equivalent to showing the drawing for one second.
Animating and Time Notation goes Hours:Minutes:Seconds:Frames.
One hour, 37 minutes, 2 seconds, and 14 frames would be written as 01:37:02:10:14
It’s important to note that the final digits in the sequence can never go over 24. As there are 60 seconds in a minute, there are 24 frames in a second. When the frame counter hits 24, a second is added and the count starts again at zero.
We’ll go into this frames more in the Animation part after Storyboards
Drawing and Style to the Breakdown
Since I'm primarily an illustrator and comic artist, I usually focus on the impact of static images. Similar to animation, comics are sequential images, but it's very much the capture of a specific frame and moment rather than many in rapid succession. What can be shown in a comic as 2 drawings requires many more for a fluid animation. The standard for modern animation is around 24 frames per second, which is an exponential increase in images from, say, a four panel sequence of two people drawing their swords to a two second scene depicting the same event.
Finding Inspiration
I don't regularly listen to Autoheart. I have things like My Chemical Romance and Metric on repeat. And other Alternative/Emo/Rock because I’m an edgelord.
But when I lie back and listen to a song, I like to picture my favorite characters and interesting scenes to go along with it. It's like making AMVS in your head.
Hungover In The City of Dust was a bit of a Tastebreaker for me. I’m not familiar with the band but immediately honed in on the lyrics.
The storyboards are more about the overall picture and general mood, but I have this weird hybrid process where I draw the base with extra keyframes and a lot more images in between than a standard storyboard. More like a lyricstuck imageset combined than clean animation keys. I have a lot of Animated Works-In-Progress that I don’t quite get around to finishing because they don’t look as good to me or hold the same feeling when I go to line them in a neater fashion. Every medium has its advantages and limitations. Part of an artist’s job is to find out what works for them and how to use such in their favor.
Full storyboards with commentary
For framing here, it was a fun angle to play around with. It’s mostly static because she's just on the ground sitting up with no fancy camerawork. What I concentrated on was the slow body language, with the motion being reluctant, almost laborious- and disorienting.
This is the only lip-synced scene in the whole piece. Terezi mouths the words serving as both a title and almost a self-awareness? The fourth-wall breaking metatextual presentation of This is the story we’re in now.
This is Terezi after killing Vriska, before the game over timeline, before [S] Remember but still in the leadup to recalling and retconning, this is somewhere reminiscent of that scene where Terezi wakes up on the ground at a low point. Faygo bottles everywhere, she's in just the scalemate boxers, tshirt, and dragon cape, absolutely wasted. You also see the Lalonde point of view of the spiral, with Rose’s drinking and the fallout after (more disaster girls), but okay!!! Back to vrisrezi. Keyword here is hungover. Next; city of dust pulls up this bleak imagery. The dust almost-settles, and the aftermath.
The lyrics that originally stood out to me to make the animatic in the first place were “Let our hearts run around in circles...” conjuring an image of cyclical motion.
Vriska and Terezi run around each other emotionally and physically, just hitting and passing by over and over again, through words and claims half-spoken and the gestures of uttering nothing at all. They care! A lot. ChaoticLawful and EvilGood.
Vriska’s secret soft inside on top of the baby she was forced to grow from all too quickly, and thinks she's a hardass. Terezi’s a hardass who thinks she's too soft and being a baby and scares herself occasionally with how neutrally calm she appears to feel on moral dilemmas.
From the commentary on Terezi: Contact Partner in Crime, in Homestuck Book 4:
Another snapshot of the tortured Scourge Sisters dynamic, in a long tale of angst and ambivalence concerning justice and morality. Terezi wrestles with this eternally. She wants to bring Vriska to justice. But she doesn't. She does, doesn't, does, doesn't. Vriska thrashes back and forth in a different way. I'm sorry, see how sorry I am? Isn't being sorry ENOUGH? What more do you want? I'm sorry, not sorry, sorry, not sorry. And being not sorry takes the form of lashing out, incrimination, daring Terezi into action, calling her bluff, etc. So her vacillation is more like, I'm sorry, fuck you, I'm sorry, you don't have the guts, I'm sorry, just kill me already! The dangerous dance goes on and on.
But there's literal circle imagery in vriska's mind control symbol, in the turning around, make her pay, the center of the light and mind symbol, the sun, and the coin flip.
And a lot of Vriska’s relationships with girls (and relationships in general) can be defined by a loop that she’s constantly out of.
They’re teenagers!
It's a story about being a kid and growing up. It's hard. It's hard and nobody understands. Part of the whole intrigue to me is it's a very real picture of the conflict of just being fuckin’ dumb and very smart at the same time, growing awkwardly into a world and and now system (SBURB) that is quite literally designed to mess with you.
They don’t stay 13 forever, though. The story goes on. We’re weird kids thrown into a ruthless world.
Now we’re weird adults. Homestuck2, the story continues.
VRISREZI is like... friends- to rivals -to girlfriends -to enemies -to dead -to regret -to timeshenanigans -to pining -to HEARTS RUNNING ROUND IN CIRCLES-to-lovers.
“We're hungover in the city of dust...”
“Let our Minds run ‘round in circles...”
Here, it switches from Hearts in the first line to Minds.
Vriska’s mind(control) powers, Terezi as a Seer of Mind… I set the ring to complete a circle with the line before flashing the ♏︎ symbol on top.
“While we figure it all out…”
This is Vriska, and The Descent after this conflict (mobius double) reacharounds its first peak, from her lashing out at Aradia (“Pay attention to me. You're so ro8otic. React to me. Say something. LOOK. Either forgive me or h8 me back. UGH. I h8 you!!!!!!!!”)
As the camera pans up to the void/sky/darkness, Tavros’ blood splatters behind Vriska before an eruption of Psiionic lightning a la Captor
It plays through this conflict that's mulling over in Vriska’s mind and taking a toll on her body(and life) up through the lyrics
Let our minds run round in circles
While we figure it all out
Feeling moody dark and heavy
There’s no feeling in my left arm=
Resonance is far away
After that it makes a flip to more Terezi-centric. Vice versa. It's vice-Vriska.
“Feeling moody dark and heavy...”
The beat drops and I cut into a more frame heavy action sequence on the next lyrics to a literal degree.
“There's no feeling in my left arm...”
The blast after Terezi informed Doc Scratch and he set off the cue-ball. I chose green for his destruction and influence, and let it linger (as his influence is known to do).
I had a lot of fun with the fire and drafting smears for the next phase of animation.
I keyframed each shake of the camera by Hand.
“And the belt wrapped around my shrinking waist is having trouble...”
Originally, this was set to still shots cut to the beat of Vriska in different outfits over the course of the story, the fairy dress, the outfit she had when she was young, her flarp outfit, the metal arm and the glasses with the eye put out, god tier, then her ghost army pirate outfit toward the end of Homestuck.
I ended up cutting out the still images and instead having a shot of her putting on her jacket for the final mission, then tightening her belt. Part of the production process is experimenting and finding out what works best along with compromising. Things don’t always stay the same and it’s important to let the work evolve and grow. At the same time, I have to be aware of limitations of the medium and *time.* (time is fake, i have executive function issues, wake me up inside)
Putting on the jacket ended up actually being more work. But I had video references.
I used PureRef to create a grid overlay similar to that in Storyboarder and scrubbed through the video frame by frame to view key poses
After getting the base movement down, I extended into the following poses I wanted from scratch.
The end of the belt flows downward, becoming the main focus after a certain point, then turning. As it swings, it becomes a rope, and as the camera follows down further…
And the sash becomes a rope becomes a noose.
