Warcraft Video: Hit the Road, Jack

Another weekend project from World of Warcraft’s Azeroth Film Institute, my second video (to the tune of “Hit the Road, Jack” by Buster Poindexter) took about a day from start to finish to create — barely in time for my 24-hour deadline.

I am quite proud of the strong pairing of character animation to the lyrics that I managed to achieve in this video.

These are really fun to create, and they also serve as an interesting enhancement to the creative side of my online résumé.

Unlike my most recent “Another Girl” video, this one was created the more traditional way: the song was selected first, and then the video was captured and created to match the song. I like the results much better this way!

Production Notes

  • The off-beat timing of the footsteps that actually brings character and soul to Jack as he trundles off was at first unintended, or at least unconscious. It just seemed to fit.
  • The repeated scenes with black or white backgrounds were originally added as part of the storyboarding process. Normally, once storyboarding is compete, I replace the scenes with “live” shots from within WoW. The few fully black scenes hadn’t been storyboarded because I had no concrete ideas what to put in those places! I spent so much time playing with various camera angles of Jack hitting the road (like at 0:55 and 2:13) that I simply ran out of time for my self-imposed deadline. So I just left the blank areas and storyboards. In the end, I actually preferred the final result over my original vision.
  • Continuity issues: there were four identical scenes (at 0:16, 0:52, 2:09, and 2:22) that were unintentionally imported at double-speed. I forgot to readjust the timing before I duplicated the scenes, and there they stuck.

3 Responses to “Warcraft Video: Hit the Road, Jack”

  1. Sean

    Nicely done. And I like the way his steps almost match the down beat. (Tiny adjustment to the frame rate(?) and it would be right on.

    Waitaminnit! Solstice?!! Dang. That witch gets into all sortsa stuff I don’t know about.

    Reply


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