Student Lyric Videos
Fall 2023, California College of the Arts
Motion Graphics, Graphic Design BFA
Instructed by Max Batt
Abridged Prompt:
Using a short segment (20-40 sec) of a song of your choosing, you will create a lyric video that typographically sets the lyrics to your song using motion graphics, while simultaneously telling the story of the song.
Douglas created a world of chalkboard-inspired fantasy in which students marvel at the unique student, Cynthia Rose.
Coming Clean by Searows depicts love after turbulent waters: after trauma rocks a relationship and threatens to split two people apart, what becomes of their love once the storm cedes? After a great shifting of the status quo, is the same love still there? Has it changed? Is it possible to be tender again? This 1-minute lyric video attempts to do that feeling justice in the form of deeply personal and gritty design and an evolving color palette that complements the complexities of the song’s message. Looping videos only somewhat recognizably depicting their subjects in duotone and rough handwritten text compose this video intended to be reminiscent of screen prints and stop-motion animation. As the video progresses, the unified relationship fractures into two differing perspectives, and even those representations splinter themselves: where can it possibly go from here?
Live, Laugh, Love – Abe Parker
by Rachel Choi
This animation is the reinterpretation of Abe Parker’s “Live, Laugh, Love.” The song conveys the common pressures and fears of having to create a happy life with a very cheerful and bright tone of song. I thought this theme of a common fear that everyone can relate to, with an easy approach has similar points with pop art. Therefore, I adopted pop art in the overall design style.
“I love you” is a conflicted ode to Ireland written in response the artists reckoning with his identity while living abroad. It explores ancestral trauma, the lingering impacts of occupation, and nuanced struggles within Irish culture.
This song is about two people who have a history of journeying in life together but have become separated due to natural forces. They are seeking each other again and won’t stop until they find the other. I wanted to represent this journey through nautical imagery as the song feels like a parable from long ago. The nautical and ocean theme represents the feeling of natural forces that has separated them due to the seas power and unpredictability.
The style of the imagery is inspired by Lino cuts and block printing with hand lettering through out. Having the feeling of the human hand was important to imply people and the inherent imperfection of life, relationships, and circumstance.
This song is about human relationships and independence. I wanted to focus on the narrator’s introspection of being independent after a breakup through the use of the zoom-in effect. The video is in different shades of black and white, eliminating color as it represents the past and emotions the narrator goes through. Grains are used to magnify the emotion, tying back to the concept of introspection.
In my motion graphics class, I created a music video using Adobe After Effects and Adobe Illustrator for the song “Sunflower” by Post Malone and Swae Lee, which is also the soundtrack of “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” “Sunflower” encapsulates the romantic emotions and growth of the characters in the Spider-Man movie. Inspired by the graffiti art in the film, I made this video using hand drawings and vectorizing.
I put significant effort into selecting color palettes, and transitions, and creating scenes and elements that represent the song’s themes.
Intended for mature audiences.
Original Sin is a song that was written and recorded in 2022 by the duo Sofi Tukker. The song speaks to the nature of the flawed world that we live in, and contextualizes human pain and suffering as reflections of our environment. This short lyric video questions the validity of the very notion of original sin, and reassures viewers that while we may be flawed and at times even hurt other people, we never really had a chance at being “good” in the first place and need not feel shame.
The piece combines neo-classical digital painting with contemporary typography and treats them in a way that is reminiscent of a title scene for a TV series or movie. The goals of this video were to feature beautiful illustration alongside subtle, ambient movement in a way that feels cohesive and well-directed in order to tell a story within a very limited amount of time.
Echo – Crusher P
by Julia Xu
With multiple personalities as inspiration, I created a black and white character holding a mask, she represents the main personality and secondary personality of this role, and the secondary personality without color sleeps under the iceberg, wakes up, and finally cries, “Why can’t I have that kind of freedom and color?”