Stranger Sounding - Mandala

A little music video for Clark Hamilton’s track “Mandala”.

This project utilizes naive, stream of consciousness animation to match Clark’s free-flowing vocals and instrumentation.

(I love this track and I’m so glad he let me use it!!!)

Initial Styleframes

I really wanted to stay loose with this piece, so to start off, I basically just doodled for hours while playing the track on loop to try and capture moments in the song without being too literal or tied up in one idea. Transitions were also an important aspect of this project in order to keep everything visually fluid. By keeping the images funky and a little nonsensical, sliding from one “scene” into the next proved a pretty straight-ahead task.

One thing to note is that I went pretty hard with the halftone texturing in these styleframes to try and give everything a bit of a handmade or tactile, printed feel, but in motion, a lot of the tone ended up looking like a noisy nightmare, so it’s way toned down in the final piece.

Boards

There’s some stuff that didn’t make it in, but this was definitely a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” situation.

Process

I primarily worked in Photoshop to do the cel animation, but since that isn’t really the best software to animate to sound on a timeline, I timed a lot of things out in After Effects using simple vector shapes to use as a guide in Photoshop.

Also, I rotoscoped myself dancing to get those little dancing guys. It’s not the most innovative process, but at least one of the original dancing videos deserves to live somewhere.