I'm planning on making a 12 minute animated action short,

>>17584460
Worry about making the animation first because odds are if your gonna plan on taking 2 years then you won't finish it. Worry about the music when it comes up

>>17584468
Heres the thing. By making the animation in correlation to some chosen music, I'm able to make it look and flow a lot better to whats being played and match scenes with cues. I want to do it this way, but maybe you're right.

>>17584460

one thing you can do is test the music. you can upload it online to youtube, just the song, and see if it gets taken down.

of course a lot can change in two years, and what was once okay, or at least ad sense worthy might become banned entirely.

if you arent dead set on a song, look into finding a small badn that will let you use one of their songs. its a tough fucking search, but you can find the right ones iwth some searching. might cost 60 bucks for the rights.

It's only bad if you plan to monetize it (make money off it by ads or selling it), but youll be fine aslong as you stay away from that.

>>17584536
This.

Big companies, especially non-us-based ones don't really give a shit who uses their content for what so long as you're not trying to profit off of it. They might even see it as free publicity.

Keep in mind that a lot of people who love to suck corporational dick will tell you you shouldn't because it's illegal, but that hardly ever applies in practical terms.
This aside, you might face the problem of having YouTube do the dick sucking and take down your video. There are ways to curb this, I think meta data on the mp3 file might have something to do with it

>>17584460

Just ask them for permission. If they say no ask what a non-commercial license would cost.

>>17584460

Never tried it, but >>17584763 seems reasonable.