DREAMLAND
Frame-by-frame hand-drawn animation music video
Animation, Illustration, Procreate, After EffectsDREAMLAND is a frame-by-frame, hand-drawn animated music video, accompanied by the song “Dreamland” by the band Glass Animals. This was a personal project, brought about via my love for animation, illustration, and Glass Animals; when they released the song in 2020, I knew I wanted to do something with it.
This animation is seventy seconds, at 15 frames per second, for a total of 1,050 frames.
ABOUT
01 Research
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02 Storyboard
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03 Illustrate
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04 Animate
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01 Research ✴ 02 Storyboard ✴ 03 Illustrate ✴ 04 Animate ✴
01 RESEARCH
Before beginning an animation, I like to take the time to research, sketch, and storyboard ideas. While researching, I keep in mind what look and feel I’m going for and try to use inspiration I find along the way to guide my brainstorming process. Creating moodboards based on research is almost always step one for me, followed by putting the ideas in my mind to paper, so I can start manipulating them to fit the “vibe” I want.
For this project, I found a lot of inspiration from Anthony Francisco Schepperd. Their colorful, surrealist style helped to develop the ideas I had swimming around in my mind and guided my process to keep the animation colorful, weird, and fluid. Likewise, the band Glass Animals has a distinctly retro style. They pull visual inspiration from retro video games, 70’s and 80’s psychadelia, and surrealism, so pulling inspiration from their aesthetic to include in the animation was simple.
02 STORYBOARD
The next step was storyboarding. This kept my ideas in line and helped guide how I would structure the video, scene by scene. I knew I’d be working with hand-drawn animation, so not only did I have to communicate the lyrics visually, but I also had to do the math, comparing how long the verse was in seconds, divided by the amount of frames I’d have to illustrate at 15 frames per second. Once I chose which verse I’d like to animate, I realized there was a lot of dead time between the beginning bells and the lyrics, so I had to customize the sound in Logic Pro to fit my vision.
03 ILLUSTRATE
Illustrating 1,050 frames was no small task. Each scene had to be divided into its own GIF, as my old iPad Pro couldn’t handle a ton of animation all at once. Each gif was then exported out of Procreate and imported into After Effects along with the soundtrack, to make sure each gif was timed correctly with the music.
04 ANIMATE
The last step of the project was to stitch everything together into one full animation. Thankfully, since Procreate has a function for frame-by-frame animation, it was fairly straightforward, and just came down to making sure the music lined up. In total, this project took around 100+ hours of tedious illustration, strategizing, and ideating. I completed this project three years ago and still look back on it with fondness.
RECOGNITION & AWARDS
Once I completed the video, I posted it to my Instagram and Twitter accounts. Not only did it gain instant traction and enjoy a short time going viral, but it was noticed and reposted by the band to their Instagram account.
I later submitted the project to The University of Oklahoma’s annual juried student show in April of 2021, where it was chosen to be displayed in The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and received the “Excellence in Film & Video” award.
