Good Life

Animation

2022

00:01:25 Duration

Inspired by ZHU's song "Good Life", this animation showcases a lyric video with digital art. The lyrics are by Adam Schmallholz, an American songwriter. The voice of the female vocalist gives off a sense of a dreamy relaxation atmosphere. The lyrics were meant to be emotional and powerful, to describe what life can be and can not. In a way, this animation can be seen as an affirmation, because of how deep the lyrics are. The whole animation was a psychological mind blower, it makes you wonder what life truly could be if we were to create our own realities with our own perceptions and to embrace it.

This animation had intentions of evoking emotions through the digital drawings, lyrics, and vocals. Each digital drawing was created to exactly represent what word was highlighted. This ensured that the message of the lyrics was to be taken seriously. I hope after seeing this animation the audience can relate, understand, and experience enlightenment, to say that the lyrics spoke to you.

Challenges that I experienced in this project were, finding a vocalist to cooperate with, digital drawings, and syncing the lyrics and drawings with the frames per second. For this project, I had to look for a vocalist, it could have been anyone regardless if they had any experience in voice acting or as a vocalist. The problem was that I didn't know many people who were willing to offer their time. So finding a vocalist was troublesome. All the digital drawings I created myself in Procreate but the problem was that I wanted to create each one with great detail which was time consuming. The next problem was that the drawings would not fit in frame for each scene, it would have been a frustrating process to try to fit them all in especially with the lyrics on screen too. The most tedious process from this project was the syncing of the lyrics with the vocals and drawings, all while following the frame per second. The frame per second was the same all throughout the duration of the animation, but in some cases the audio was too fast for the lyrics to catch up and stay on the screen, it was either too fast or too slow.

The goal of this project was to create an animation based on a song, monologue, article, lyrics or a speech. This animation also included audio to help with the theme of the animation.

Background music, audio, or sound effects were optional but in this case it benefited because of the vibe and atmosphere that I was aiming for. A vocalist was needed to read or sing the lyrics. This project helped me experiment with animation much more and to get out of my comfort zone and request assistance or cooperation from another department. It truly was a wonderful experience to do this project and to give credits where it was due. I am thankful to Holly for bringing my project to life, and I couldn't think of anyone else to replace her with.

To solve the issue of finding a vocalist, I sent out an email to the theater department and asked if anyone could offer their assistance. The students who would volunteer would get an additional extra credit to their grade so it was a win-win scenario for both parties. I got an email back from three students but I chose to go with the only female vocalist because I wanted it to be said from another perspective compared to Schmallholz's speech. The voice actress was a fellow student from the theater department at the University of North Carolina of Greensboro. Her voice is what sets the tone of this animation. I modified her voice in after effects to create that dream-like atmosphere, this was my intention for the whole animation. Originally two or more drawings would not fit into a scene so I decided to reduce the size of each drawing so that they would fit in each scene, even though I was against the idea because the smaller the drawing the less emphasis it expressed. Syncing everything to the frame per second was tedious, it took many hours and more than one-hundred keyframes to complete this final process. I used all the keyframes needed to sync everything so that it would flow smoothly and with the lyrics.