one_of_us

If you’ve ever been (un)fortunate enough to have loved and lost, then you’ll be aware of that strange phenomenon in which it seems that every song you hear speaks to the deep, debilitating pain you’re experiencing in a way so personal that it feels as if the lyrics could only have been penned in order to address your wretched condition. As low as we all know that feeling can be, as they say, out of great pain comes great art, and so it was when Marcelo Jeneci’s lovelorn track One of Us inspired animator Fabricio Lima to channel his recent romantic difficulties into a music video. Lima tells us how he reopened the wound to get this highly emotional project done.

As usual with my work, this project has a very strong emotional backbone. The song itself was composed by the singer Marcelo Jeneci in the midst of a crisis with his personal life, which is why it is so sad. Consequently, I heard the song when I was also going through some difficult love issues too, so I suggested to Marcelo that we collaborated in sort of a ‘venting’ mechanism, using graphics and this crazy space story to… to finally let it go. Marcelo awesomely replied and said yes. It was great, because I’ve been a huge fan of his for quite some time!

The production of One of Us took around 10 months in total! But that is because I could only work on it during non-commercial hours, and since it was frame by frame drawings, it took a much longer time to animate. Even simple things like a person moving their arms would take 1-2 entire days to get it nicely done like you can see in this GIF:

JENECI_movimento_corpo_Finale_B
one_of_us_sequenciaOpeningChest

As far as creating this from scratch, the whole process was very organic. I did things that I felt like and the story took sometimes unexpected turns with that. I didnt have a full storyboard, I had some drawings in a long sequence, of how I imagined it to be, but kept changing and adjusting as I felt. In the meantime, I would show my work in progress to Marcelo to get his feedback, and to see if his story was being portrayed gently.

The fun fact of this video is that after 8 months, I was already over my sad love stories… so, going back to animate more things about it was a bit painful because I had to make myself sad again to continue the story!! So for that reason, not having a storyboard was equally a blessing and a curse 🙂

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