As South Africans, we aim to celebrate our culture, I did this through the creation of a lyric video for our favourite local song. Using the first two verses and chorus' I had to present the lyrics in a an artistic way that correlates with the meaning of the song’s lyrics. A youthful perspective was used to create playful underwater imagery to be paired with and aid the lyrics.
I had to create a lyric video for the song Into the Wilderness by the band Early Hours, dynamically presenting the lyrics that reflects the song's meaning with the help of drawn underwater imagery.
I have used the song's theme of journeying the unknown, and explored it through a youthful perspective. This paired with the water imagery in the song and a child's imagination inspired the concept of an underwater world. To convey this perspective, a children like drawings were used.
This concept additionally explores a child's fear of the dark. Using light backgrounds for the safe and familiar and dark backgrounds symbolizing the fear of the unknown. The idea of the familiar and "known" are represented by a city, signifying comfort and the known.
The video starts in an underwater city, a metaphor for a comfort zone, then transitions into the dark unknown of the "wilderness," where courage is symbolized by the bioluminescence of the deep sea. This progression represents finding light and courage in the midst of fear.
To keep to the theme of an underwater world I used cool colours of blues and greens, varying in hues and shades depending on the sea level. For contrast a complimentary coral colour was used.
To ensure legibility throughout the video, I selected a heavier sans serif typeface instead of soft script fonts, aiming for a standout effect.
I also wanted a pencil-textured look, preferably in sans serif style rather than actual handwriting.
The primary font of Greycliff was paired with a secondary typeface, Dirty Marker, chosen for highlighted text in uppercase and larger sizes. These two fonts, fairly similar in style, complement each other effectively.
To keep and establish a more noticeable output of the youthful perspective, all assets were sketchily hand drawn with textured crayon brush to allude to a child's drawings. To add more texture and character to the drawings, I used different sized brushes with slightly different colours and scribbled over large areas.
After initially using simple imagery that would slowly move in the background, it was decided that more movement was needed. To fix this I made a large canvas asset (image 1) that would be zoomed in on and have the camera move between areas to create different scenes for the typography to interact with.
However, to keep a level of scientific accuracy when referring to the deep sea and its marine life, I create my imagery assets by actual images of deep sea coral and fish as references.
When animating the opening sequence, specifically the beams of light, I focused on how light moves due to the water moving. These beams of light are not stationary nor do they stay fully bright all the time, which I attempted to reflect in my animation by copying the movements.
This video features the song Into the Wilderness by Early Hours. The song is protected by copyright law, and its use here is for educational and non-commercial purposes only.
