The incredible Lee Gingold was approached by Drax Project to create a Lyric video for their latest single "All This Time". I was fortunate enough to be asked to team up with Lee to create this animation with him.
The concept of the animation was to create an infinite run game based narrative. We chose to go for a more 'indie' look as Drax Project has a more alternative vibe.
Drax Project | June 2019 Single Release | “All This Time”
Drax Project is a four man New Zealand band that formed in 2014. In their earlier busking days, you would see the starting members Shaan on sax and Matt on drums (Drums + Sax = Drax) performing pop song covers around Wellington’s Courtenay Place. These days however, the band creates original materials; a mix of Jazz, R&B and Pop. Their 2017 single “Woke up Late” (Created at Dusk by Lee Gingold) was their big break and saw the band’s rise in prominence, leading to great popularity on Spotify, opening for Ed Sheeran’s Auckland performances and being certified triple platinum by RIANZ.
Lee Gingold who directed “Woke Up Late” was approached by the band to create a Lyric video for their latest single "All This Time". I was fortunate enough to be asked to team up with Lee to create this animation with him.
Drax Project Video Game
The concept of the animation was to create an Infinite Run game based narrative. The idea was that Shaan (Lead Vocalist and Sax) would run through the levels collecting ‘Sax coins’ and power-ups and at key moments in the song where we hear Shaan’s Saxophone drops, we would enter a boss stage where he would battle one of the other band members.
We chose to go for a more 'indie' look as Drax Project has a more alternative vibe. This style of storytelling created an interesting challenge for us as instead of creating an animation sequence entirely from start to finish as with traditional practices, we needed to create the character animations, the environments and sequences in parts (similar to how game assets are built) then stitch them together.
Designing the Band Members
The first task was looking into a simple character design of all the band members. Studying key features of each of the boys to distill them into easily recognisable character designs was a great challenge.
Band members from left, Ben O’Leary, Shaan Singh, Matt Beachen, Sam Thomson.
One of the factors that needed to be considered was that since we planned to have both wide and extremely wide shots of the characters, the designs needed to have enough details up close but also be simple enough from afar with defined silhouettes.
Environment and UI Design
Once the characters were signed off, we moved on to planning out the look and feel of the game. Attention to detail was key since we wanted to create a piece that felt like a game-play of an actual playable game. This meant that on top of the environment design (Level Design), we needed to design the UI (user interface) such as health bars, power-ups, ‘coins’ and timers.
concept frame of the game design.
Initial environment sketch
3D simulations were used for some of the more complex animations to create more dynamism
Character Animations
Lee and I came up with a work flow where I created a huge set of looping character animations that could seamlessly be played sequentially from one another. This allowed Lee the flexibility and freedom to bring in all the short loops into an edit and piece the actions together in a way that best expressed key moments in the lyrics and the audio.
Basic Run cycle
Basic Jump to Run
Big Jump to Run
Leap to Fall
Power-ups
A fun opportunity in Game Designs is when a character obtains some sort of a power-up by collecting a special item. We came up with the idea of Shaan running through the levels collecting little saxophone coins like in the classic Mario games. Once he was able to obtain enough of these coins, he would summon his saxophone for the boss levels. On top of the ‘Sax Coins’ we also wanted to create another set of power-ups to give Shaan more unique abilities during the run. We wanted to pick objects for the icons that were in keeping with the Drax Project brand and came up with a sneaker icon that allows a boost in speed for a short time and a basketball icon that allowed him to leap higher and further.
‘Sax Coins’
Power-up icon | Sneakers for extra speed
Power-up icon | Basket ball for extra leap ability
Boss Levels
Like with the run levels, looping animations were created for the battle scenes. It was important however with these particular animations to make sure that the band members’ body language matched their live performances, that the instruments looked like theirs and their motions were musically on point.
Shaan instrument loop
Ben instrument loop
Sam instrument loop
Matt instrument loop
Drax Project - All This Time (Lyric Video)
ARTIST DRAX PROJECT | LICENSED TO YOUTUBE BY THREE HUNDRED, UMG, SME (ON BEHALF OF 300 ENTERTAINMENT); CMRRA,ASCAP, WARNER CHAPPELL, LATINAUTOR AND 9 MUSIC RIGHTS SOCIETIES | CREATED BY LEE GINGOLD + LEO CHIDA | COMPOSITING, EDITING, ENVIRONMENT DESIGN LEE GINGOLD | CHARACTER DESIGN + ANIMATION, FX DESIGN LEO CHIDA
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