Jonah Hammen –
As more and more artists have been hitting social media, groups and communities, they have been collaborating on a number of collaborative events. One such large-scale project is, as freshman entertainment design student Brodie Spolar describes, something known as a reanimated collab. “What happens is basically a bunch of animators—and I mean, like, a LOT of them—come together and each take a couple seconds of, like, an episode of a show or once some peeps used an entire movie and animate those couple seconds in their own style. Then at the end you just smoosh it all together and it’s cohesive again! We’re basically just reimagining it.”
Spolar is part of a reanimated collab called Cuphead the Musical Reanimated. In this collab—with “collab” being short for “collaboration”—himself and 90 other animators online are taking a music video from the YouTube channel “Random Encounters” and recreating it with the reanimation method. For his scene, Spolar is using a mix of two-dimensional drawings and stop-motion to animate a pirate character dancing back and forth with some extra arts and crafts background elements thrown in for good measure. “I animated the lil’ pirate guy on pieces of paper and stuck ‘em onto a bunch of sticks. I’ll be making this foreground-illusion-type-thing out of cardboard and oil paint, make it look like a pirate ship and stick it in front of him so it looks like he’s dancing on it. Like in the original clip I’m using for reference, and then I’ll be making cardboard [and] oil paint waves to put behind him. Make it even more convincing!”
This collaborative project will be featuring all different kinds of artistic mediums: 2D animation, 3D, stop-motion, papercraft, live-action and animation mix, and rotoscope to name a small handful! The collab is even allowing other non-animated forms of artistic expression such as cosplay and puppetry to join in and give their own spin on their given scene. The reanimated music video is set to come out sometime this year Spolar says – and from the sounds of it, will be a very unique, trippy and ultimately incredibly artsy spectacle.