Client: Comma
Project: 3D animated music video with 2D animated lyrics
Skills: 3D design and animation in Blender
typography, animation, and color correction in After Effects
Comma hired me to animate the lyric video for his song, Spider. We explored several ideas and ultimately chose a design featuring a single cloud floating in a spider’s web high above the world to symbolize the isolation of the song’s lyrics. I chose to render this surreal scene in a realistic style using Blender’s cycles engine to illuminate the volumetric cloud shader. The rendered frames were then imported into Adobe After Effects where I animated the lyrics, title sequence, and performed final color correction and VFX tweaking.
The first step in building the 3D scene involved using Blender’s geometry nodes to generate the shape of a simple spider web. The plane containing the web was then animated using a displace modifier and noise texture to simulate the motion of the web waving in a light breeze. This was placed against 360 degree panoramic gradient that transitions from deep sky blue to white approximating the sky on a sunny day.
Building the cloud shader required finding a way to animate looping textures that would allow me to render seamless loops of various lengths. This allowed me to export short animations to use in promotional materials quickly and easily without modifications. Two cameras were added and animated with dynamic movements to match the rhythm of the music and draw the viewer into the scene.
The 5,000 frames of animation were imported into After Effects to create a 4 minute 34 second sequence and I started on the text animation section of the project. The typography is bold and clean, designed to ensure readability while fitting the project’s dreamy aesthetic. The animation is carefully timed to the lyrics to enhance their impact and add subtle emphasis to key words and phrases.
The final outcome was a piece rich in emotional impact with aesthetics that perfectly compliment Comma’s contemplative lyrics with poignant imagery to craft a thought-provoking and memorable tribute.
