Ledinsky & Genero Behind the Scenes
I stared out by writing the script, based on the songs lyrics. Every scene in some way matched the narrative of the song, but I still wanted the story to have a beginning, middle and an end.
I started out by blocking shots and "drew" - in the most humiliating incarnation of that word - a storyboard. I shot each of them with my shitty cell phone camera so I didn't have to go through the tedious work of scanning them into the computer. After all, more resolution wouldn't flog these dead horses of drawings into looking any better, but hey - at least they made it easy to edit now that I had all the scenes visualised. Sure, by a 2-year old trapped in a 35-year olds body, but still.
Now that I had the pacing of each scene locked, I brought the Premiere project into After Effects and started to replace the crap scene placeholders with actual animated scenes, one by one. I started out by creating the characters of Ledinsky and Trump, so I could rig them and animate them. Based of the clothes and attire Ledinsky posted to his Instagram, I illustrated him and layered him, joint by joint. I then imported the illustrator document into Photoshop so I could texture the puppet with grit and tattoos etc.
Every scene needed its illustrations, and once I had them done in illustrator, I took them all into Photoshop to add texture and grit to them. See below for before/after.
After animation all the scenes (basically being done with the video), for the final look I added the grade - a giant stack of film emulations, color corrections, vintage lens distortion simulations and film damage & dust. Before and after below. Click images for full resolution!
