Animated Lyrics Video: Behind the Scenes

We’ve wanted to create an animated lyrics video forever and guess what – we finally did it! Ina knew the perfect artist for our first attempts at a music video. Secta is one of the best underground Bulgarian rappers and a super nice guy that not only wanted to work with us, but also gave us complete creative freedom. And this is what we did…

The whole team, together with our designers Nikki & Stella, our script and concept writer Iva, and fearless leader Ina came together to brainstorm ideas and concepts for the video. The first challenge with faced was the fact that we had to do an animated lyrics video for a rap song. That means having to visualize a lot of lyrics that change very quickly. At the same time, if the scenes change too fast, the video will end up incoherent and overwhelming for the viewers. That’s why we had to find visual metaphors that “spoke” for the entire verse and showcase only the strongest lyrics on screen.

The song is confessional and almost autobiographical, so we picked a hand-drawn style that would give the video a unique and personal look. This is also how we came up with the idea of each scene being a photo in a photo album. 

Our designer Nikki painted all of the illustrations by hand in Photoshop. She managed to create a hand-drawn look and a contrast between the character of Secta and the others. While Secta is more realistic, the other characters are stylized to emphasize that they’re a figment of his memories.

She chose two different palettes – one for the “reality” and one for the memories of the character. The scenes with Secta are achromatic and colder, which shows his emotional state. In contrast, the color palette of the photos is bright, nostalgic, and with emphasis on purple and pink. The composition of the scenes is static which invokes a feeling of claustrophobia – like being stuck.

Our extremely talented animator Andy only was a little anxious to work with Photoshop raster files with this level of detail but took on the challenge. The concept of the video demanded a frame-by-frame look, so he used a line boil effect to simulate hand-drawn animation. The boil effect happens in traditional animation when different frames can’t aline perfectly so they appear to be moving – or boiling. On a smaller scale, the boiling effect makes the lines look jagged as if drawn with a pencil. 

And this is how our dream team created the music video for Secta’s Една история. The animation turned out excellent and we’re super proud of it. We’re glad to say that our music video is one of a kind – just like the artist himself.

Check out the final animated lyrics video (in Bulgarian) and the behind-the-scenes process in the video at the top.