Click here to download the source files: axel_f.zip

This was… a lot of work.

I’ve had this idea pretty much ever since I first saw Animusic. To make an Animusic-style animation of this song. It just seemed like the perfect fit! The synth instruments would make a great fit for lasers and robots of Animusic. And this idea just wouldn’t leave. I had to do it. My brain wouldn’t have it any other way. Only now, as I’m thinking about it, do I realize that I didn’t even need to do this at all.

But I had to.

My previous animation, “Mr. Dudeley”, was supposed to be a simple proof-of-concept demo — a kind of stepping-stone to get to this animation. This one was the real goal.

The design for the lead synth instrument was pretty much fully formed in my head ever since I’ve been thinking about this, but the other instruments were trickier. I was planning to make the drumset look more like an actual drumset, but that would have been impractical for the drumbot to actually play. The orange “hex” instrument was kind of tricky to figure out. I guess the inspiration might have come from some kind of organ, but I really have no idea. I included the strings in the instrument as a sort of two-in-one combo (the kind Animusic is famous for), which then led to the idea of him strumming the strings and then needing to hit the panic button. The bass instrument was the hardest one to figure out: what was it, even? Was it some kind of strings? Could I do something more abstract, maybe? The idea for the pipes came when I was touring a science building, where they had an interactive demonstration where you could bang on pipes with paddles. And the pipes were arranged in parallel, pointing upward, with a little curve at the bottom. And seeing that, and hearing it, was that “bingo!” moment where I realized that this was what the bass instrument should look like.

Looking back on the process now, I find myself wondering why it took so long. What was I doing which took me two entire years to finish? Well, besides the fact that I had college to go to (and a whole lot of other stuff, like Life in General), I spent a long time refining the animation of every singe instrument. There was allso a lot custom animation I had to do, too, like the part where the hexbot hits the panic button. (I added a facility to “exclude” frame ranges so that you could insert custom animation in between the musical animation segments.) And draping the cables all over the floor, that took a long time too. (I tried running cloth simulations on them, but they never worked properly. Instead, I ended up turning them into Path objects, and I had to manually model them. It was… a lot of work.)

It took about two days to render this animation, because I was using Cycles. (I knew from the start that it was going to need it.) And I had to do it three-and-one-eighth times, because the first one was a test render (I knew I was going to throw that one away). The second one I thought was going to be the final render, but in post processing, the denoise filter didn’t work. So I had to render it a third time, with denoising enabled during the render.

Was it all worth it?

Well, I don’t know yet, because I haven’t yet posted the video at the time of writing. But I hope so.

By the way, yes, I know this song is copyrighted, and yes, that means I won’t be able to monetize the video, and yes, I’m absolutely fine with that. I know it’s not my song. I didn’t do this for the money; I did this because I had to. I had to.

I might make some solo cam videos in the future. We’ll see.