First Contact (music video)

Galactaron - First ContactFirst Contact - YouTubeGalactaron - First Contact-2First Contact - Vimeo
## Summary

A Chinese American girl stumbles across an alien rock band on the frozen lake near her home.

## Transcript

EMILY: *Wow*...

SINGER:

When yo see you, wǒ wanna see everything

When yo see you, wǒ wanna see everything

When yo see you, wǒ wanna see everything

When yo see you, wǒ wanna see everything

EMILY: Oh, it’s nice to meet you too! I’m Emily, what’s your name?

SINGER: Singer.

EMILY: Singer? O-okay, that’s a very unique name. What about this little guy?

SINGER: Bass.

EMILY: Bass? Oh, no. Well I meant like- nevermind. You guys must be freezing! Follow me, let’s go to my house, ok? C’mon Guitar!

## Process

#### From galactaron.com:

As you may or may not know, we’ve been hard at work on “First Contact.” It’s the music video to go along with our song of the same name. We thought we should update you on the progress and explain a little bit about what goes into a two-dimensional animation.

One of the biggest differences between 2D and 3D animation is the amount of time it takes to make them and where the time goes. In a 3D animation, most of the time is used modeling the characters inside a computer, giving them “bones” to animate, and texturing/lighting them to correctly to make sure they look good. After you get these things down, it doesn’t take nearly as much time to actually animate what you see. You put in a lot of preplanning and it all pays off in the end by making things quicker and easier to animate.

However, in 2D animation, the process is much slower and more linear. Each frame of an animation has to be drawn by hand. One second of animation is usually about 12 drawings.

It’s especially hard when animating humans. Humans are so difficult! If anything looks even a little bit unnatural you find it creepy and you don’t like it! Your brain’s wiring has made this into an especially difficult task.

Here are some step by step examples of what goes into creating just one frame of animation.

First, the character must be sketched out in their pose. This stage of animation is called the “Pencil” stage. It’s usually one of the longest stages in 2D animation. This is the part where you make sure the character moves correctly and flows easily from pose to pose. If it’s not correct in the pencil stage, it’s not going to get much better in the next stage after that. Pencils can be more detailed than this, but often, they’re less detailed.

## Influences

The style of "First Contact" has been likened to that of Ghibli films, which Dennis cites as prominent influences:

> "Miyazaki was a heavy influence on it actually. Since it was supposed to look like VHS's from my childhood (or at least, how I remember them, so it's higher quality than real VHS's) I was thinking of cartoons from when I was a kid. The Japanese influence on American pop culture of the 80's and 90's was supposed to be included. So I was thinking Castle in the Sky, Akira, My Neighbor Totoro, original Transformers, etc."
>
>

## Trivia

* This video took six months to complete.
* It was screened at the 2013 LA Film Festival.
* Owen Dennis did all the animation, backgrounds, and sound design.
* The VEVO version of "First Contact" lacks the intro and outro screens, as well as the VHS effect.

### References

1. ↑ Galactaron: First Contact (Video 2012) - IMDb
2. ↑ Wayback Machine (archive.org)
3. ↑ Meet Galactaron
4. ↑ Galactaron - First Contact - YouTube