“Get Busy Living” by Mike Scott

A little something from South Africa today: animator Mike Scott (previously on Cartoon Brew) made this music video for Goldfish’s song “Get Busy Living.” It’s a treat to see someone advocate a purely digital illustration style and not use software to mimic a traditional animation look. His creative use of limited animation techniques and superb color are also worthy of mention.

He explained to us his process and ideas behind this one-man production:

Got a thick pad and drew out shots for each scene. Put that into an animatic in Toon Boom Storyboard Pro, and then got busy with Photoshop. Drew it all in Photoshop CS4 with mostly a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet and a little bit of a Cintiq 12 WX. I then animated all the image layers in Anime Studio Pro 7, and composited with Final Cut Express 4 HD.

In short, Goldfish wanted to have a story where their luggage goes on an epic adventure. They’ve done really well for themselves, often flying out to Ibiza to play sets there, and other world destinations, so I figure they’ve spent a lot of time around airports. Often their gear gets a little ‘handled’ during transport, so they had the idea of their luggage living this alternate life that they don’t know about. So when your bag goes missing, what REALLY happens to it?

They had the idea for a while and we exchanged notes quite a bit, figured the bag would mission off all over the place and ‘get busy living’, meet a girl bag and have this epic romance ha ha. Had a lot of fun with the video, worked on it in the beginning stages whilst I was in London to attend a buddy’s wedding, a bunch of storyboarding whilst I walked around Edinburgh for Edinbugh Festival, and did the rest at home in Plettenberg Bay in South Africa.