University Project
Brief:
Make a one minute edit of a song, and create a square format Spotify / Instagram ‘visualiser’ for it.
Mediums:
Watercolour, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe AfterEffects
Florence + The Machine is a band I have been following for over 10 years, and I often turn to their music when I need extra inspiration.
However, it was harder to select a specific song to work with. I turned to the book, which I own, released by the lead singer Florence Welch and titled “Useless Magic”. There, I could read through the lyrics of various songs and narrow down, which ones would be best supported by animation.
This led me to choosing the song “Howl”. The song has a clear theme of love, which starts pure and turns dark the more it grows, but the lyrics themselves gave me enough freedom to be able to express this in a few different ways.
I decided to look at old fairy tale books. The concepts of a dark, magical forest, two lovers transforming into beasts, seeking the protection of an ancient tree, all appear in fairy tales. Unfortunately, I do not have my Bulgarian books with me physically, but my flatmates brought their childhood books, printed in Russia in 1992. The illustrations in them fit perfectly into what I had in mind, and surprisingly had a visual style similar to mine. I also quite liked the idea of having a border around the images, where I could include more archetypical motifs.
I started creating an animation based on traditional paintings. Coincidentally, as I was in the process of creating the animation, Florence released TikToks promoting the new album in the exact style that I chose. This gave me confidence that I was on the right track and including more stop motion would not be a mistake.
For the most part, the animation was done either as frame by frame animation in photoshop or using key frames for the properties of images, such as position, scale and rotation. For the heart scene, I used magnify effect to simulate a heartbeat in an easy and quick way. There were a lot of revisions along the process, I ended up completely redoing some scenes in order to get more natural movement and fix timing issues. There was also a lengthy process of adding and removing elements until I reached a balanced frame.
