My good friends Kelly and Kammile of Karmina reached out to me wanting to work on a music video for an upcoming song. felt so grateful for the chance to work on this because I've always wanted to make a music video and these are some of my favorite people to work with.
My first steps were to both design a general look for the project and at the same time start a storyboard for the major moments. There was already a version of the song created and the timing was locked so i knew once i began things wouldn't shift around a lot and I could get really custom with the transition moments.
Example of a frame style, looking into a celestial visual with stars and planets.
The chorus section of the storyboard.
Example of the storyboard timed out to the song.
Knowing the chorus would appear several times, I wanted to devote more of time into this sequence making it even more special and allowing it to evolve visually over the piece. I ended up bringing the animation into 3D for the planets and then applied a hand animated textures to unify the visuals.
Now that almost everything was planned out, I went through and drew several states of each illustration to create the wiggling lines effect seen. I brought the illustrations into after effects from procreate which i would then cut up into sections that looped. I would also animate by hand any custom animations. For the type I would import clean text into procreate, traced the type multiple times, and then export it into after effects.
Finally i brought in the color and final details like the stars for the entire piece. One problem I ran into is after I created all the stars using particular, we paused the project for several months (while my son was born) and when i picked it back up my particular upgraded and everything needed to be updated. It would have taken longer to update all my particle layers so I ended up only targeting the scenes i was still animating. Looking back it probably would have been quicker to simply redo all the stars in the new system from scratch.
Credits:
Music: Karmina
Illustration, Design, Animation: Jonathan Larson (JJLL Design)
