Project Breakdown

I first heard this song premiered on Martin Garrix’s radioshow (2 weeks prior to the song’s release), and from the first listen I already had ideas in mind for what I could create for a lyric video. My aim was to get the project done and uploaded on the same day that the song released, so with that in mind, I began working on it. The first thing I did was start creating the background visual. One of the main ideas I had was to make the background an analog TV effect. I found one tutorial that seemed perfect for what I wanted, especially as it included a glitch effect too, which I thought was a good idea for my video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbD5N8xGWbk). After watching this video, I learnt a great deal about the different effects used like Venetian Blinds and Wave Warp and the skill of layering different effects to create more unique styles. However, before I did all this, I needed a piece of existing footage to add these effects to – so I found a copyright free stock video online of static from a TV (https://www.pexels.com/video/noise-video-4990235/). I changed the original colours of the footage (Red, Green & Blue), to just blue. This gave the background a really nice look that matched with the vibe of the song. I did also notice that there are white lines that appear at certain times in the footage, and thought this didn’t look right, especially with all the effects I had added. So I took the footage into Premiere Pro, and removed the singular frames where these lines appeared.

The next thing I wanted to do was create an additional animation for the background for the drop of the song. I started this by creating a wiggle animation using After Effects’ expression function. I combined this with Optics Compensation and CC Light Burst 2.5 and also removed Posterize Time – an effect which limits the frame rate of the video. This effect was added in the first place to add to the analog TV look.

Next was the typography. I first chose the font (Bacalar Expanded) and played around with the size and the leading. When I was happy with this, I went through every line of the lyrics and timed each word perfectly to appear. I also created an animation on this, which was a reveal animation from left to right. After some trial and error, this was complete. But I wanted to do more with the text, so I duplicated all the effects I used to make the analog TV style for the background, and put this on the text. I altered some of the individual effects a little and the video was complete.

By this point, the song’s release date had been announced by the label, with the cover art shown. The colours in the cover art were mostly purple/pink, and I decided to change the colours of my video to match this. I also messaged Merow, the artist behind the song, to ask what the official lyrics were, so I wasn’t making a mistake with any of the lyrics. She very kindly sent them to me, and I confirmed that all but one word was correct, so I quickly fixed this, rendered out my video and uploaded it on the day of the song’s release as was my aim.