Dreamland
You want something bizarre?
When I first heard the song “Dreamland” by Glass Animals, I knew it was going to be my favorite song for a long, long time. Not only is it by one of my very favorite bands, but the lyrics and the sounds were just so colorful– I knew I had to animate it. With synesthesia, I experience music differently. My brain translates sounds into colors and textures with their own individual movements, so I figured I’d give animating my synesthesia a shot. “Dreamland” turned into a passion project and perhaps one of my favorites to date; it was even recognized and reposted by the band!
RESOURCES & STRATEGYHand-drawn Animation
Illustration
Procreate
Adobe After Effects
Logic Pro
My Strategy:
As with any successful animation project, I started with storyboards. These kept my ideas in line and helped me brainstorm how I would structure this video. I knew I’d be working with hand-drawn illustration, 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 the lyrics were decided, 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.
Inspiration:
Along with Glass Animals’ general aesthetic, I was heavily inspired by the animation work done by Anthony Francisco Schepperd. Their music videos for “It’s Called: Freefall” and “The Music Scene” are incredible, I highly recommend checking them out. The perfect blend of trippy, thoughtful, and experiential, I wanted my project to emulate the spirit of their work.
My Process:
The entire video came out to be 70 seconds. Multiply that by 15 and you have about 1,050 frames, way too much for an old iPad Pro to process in one animation from start to finish. I chose to use Procreate, as you can choose the stop-motion animation option and onion-skin your way through each frame. I chose to separate each section of the video into individual gifs and then stitch them into the entire music video in After Effects, along with the music. This strategy was time-consuming, but it worked well. While there are much more efficient ways to go about this project, it was rather cathartic to get to pour my heart into an illustration project for about 100+ hours. Sometimes, taking the long way is nice.
The Final Video:
The project period for this video was only three weeks, but I made sure this video was completed to the very best of my ability. After over 100 hours of drawing, animating, and editing, I submitted the video as well as posted it to social media, since I was proud of how it turned out. It was recognized by the band, reposted to their Instagram story, and viewed by more than 3,000 users.
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.