555

555 by Dayi

I worked with a musical artist to create custom album art and a short animated video teasing this song's release.

Concepts and Illustrating

I started with listening to the song over and over again, trying to paint a picture in my mind of what the overall mood of the song was. 555 made me think of sunrises and sunsets and "golden hour" where the sky is swirling with hues of yellow, pink, and orange.

I tried a lot of different concepts- a sunset view from a window with the time "555" showing on a cell phone by the window, a beach sunset view with a phone in view showing the time, a hallway view without a sunset showing the time, and the concept that made it through to the end- the picnic sunset view.

Although I had many different concepts of what the song cover could be, the concept of the picnic at sunset ended up being my favorite and I kept elaborating on that. I really liked the idea of the balloons being the artist's name and theoretically waving in the wind, but ended up changing the layout of the artist and song name to better emphasize the "555" part of the song and mood of the illustration.

I added a digital clock to one of the final drawings that was used in the final animation to show an alarm going off with "555" being stuck on the screen, before fading into sky.

Animating

This was one of my first ventures into animation, and I encountered some problems when starting the animation process. Since I had drawn the entire image first before deciding to animate it, it was difficult to separate the elements and animate the grass waving in the wind frame by frame. The balloons were also going to be a challenge as well, and I ended up scrapping the balloon idea completely since I wasn't completely happy with the layout and wasn't confident in my ability to properly animate them waving around.

I used Procreate to create the illustration, and Procreate Dreams to animate most of the moving elements. Dreams made it very easy to get my foot in the door with animating, as they have this great feature where you can simply press record and physically move layers around to create movement. I used this technique to move and stretch around the layers of grass and flowers, as well as moving the clouds across the sky.

Although I do like how it came out in the end, especially since at this point in time I didn't have a lot of experience animating, it does look very stiff. This was expected of course since it wasn't drawn frame by frame, and I didn't draw it in sections as I should have if I planned to animate it from the beginning.

To try and make it look more intentional and less stiff and amateur, I decided to make a separate 2D animation of some flower petals floating across the sky.

This was animated frame-by-frame, in ToonSquid. I think it adds a lot to the final illustration and animation, and takes the viewer's focus off of the stiffness of the grass and flower animations.

Here is what it looks like added to the illustration by itself.