Choosing the Final Look of my Music Video

Following on from my latest post, I asked around my class and close friends and family for the most popular form of animation which I would use for my music video. I decided to ask to find out what people would most like to see, giving people the following choices:

• Cutout animation using black and white paper cutouts - the cutouts would be easy as I would just be copying out the designs from my storyboards again, and the black and white would add to the main character's feeling of isolation, a key theme in the song. This method would be effective and take up a decent amount of time.
• Cutout animation in colour - this was a recent idea which came about after seeing the film opening to 'Juno' which was forwarded to me. It would match my vision very well because there are areas of block colour which tie in well with my art style, and the colours would add more interest and be better to look at as an animation. The movements are also very similar to how my final product would probably look, so this method would look the most effective but probably be the most time consuming.
• Traditional 2D computer animation - using images created in Gimp or Photoshop. This would be the easiest method to work with, given that I would create all my images on the computer including each individual frame of animation, so if any errors are made these would be easy to correct, whereas with other methods the whole shot would need to be filmed again.

After asking my class, family and friends, it was decided to go for the second option as had been planned all along. I would agree this is a good decision because it would be best for my music video - computer animation and stop-motion are formats I am experienced with, so whilst cutout animations would follow similar principles, it is something I have not done before and therefore a challenge to look forward to. It also gives the video itself a unique feel and much more independent and artistic tones, whilst suiting the song very well.