For my final animatic project for my Visual Storytelling class I chose to work around one of my favorite songs, “I Raise Hell” by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. The idea was to go back and forth between the character, Bella, singing the song on stage, and her summoning a portal to Hell. I wanted it to feel as if her singing was describing the latter. To do this, I cut between those two scenes frequently, which was challenging to time properly.

My other animatic projects in this class had been scripted and put together by me, so I was able to be in full control of the timing. For this project I was able to learn skills in time planning and how to sync tracks and visuals together using Adobe Premiere. I really loved working on this piece and I would love to rework it to include the entire song. 

The inspiration for the style of this animatic, like with “Film Meowoir”, was the Fleischer Studios cartoon, Betty Boop. The song itself really feels like it could be animated in the 1930s cartoon style, so I based my characters off of that genre. Betty Boop herself was a reference for the design of Bella, and Lucy is based off of Fearless Fred, another Betty Boop character. In this piece I also tried to mimic the bouncing movement in 1930s animation, which was the most difficult part to line up with the song but was effective at informing the playful mood of the piece.