Designing a Lyric Video

This was a project for one of my classes, called Vormgeving (translated "Design"). During this class, we had two individual assignments. One of which, was called Designing a Lyric Video.

In this project, we had a fictional assignment from Spotify, to make a video in vertical format, with the lyrics of one song animated. This animation, or way of displaying the lyrics, should have the same look and feel as the song itself, and the listeners should get a deeper listen experience from it.

The song that I went for was the Louis Armstrong version of "La Vie En Rose", one of my favorite songs. I found the lyrics and the way Louis performed the song, really fitted my idea for the video.

You can find the video on Vimeo, or you can watch it on the bottom of this page.

Starting Out

I started this project with thinking about which song I wanted to make this video for. I wasn't sure what feeling and mood I wanted to go for, but seeing that La Vie En Rose is my favorite song, I knew I couldn't go wrong with it. It's such a sweet and romantic song, and when I decided to go for it, I immediately had some ideas for how I wanted it to look.

I knew I wanted to do something with the colors of the sunset, with roses, and perhaps something with Paris or France in general (as homage to Edith Piaf, the original singer of the song).

I made a couple of sketches for different versions of the title screen design, the sketch here being one of them.

Making the Video

After sketching out the first few versions of the title screen, I came up with another idea that I immediately knew I wanted to continue with. Instead of having roses or the Eiffel Tower somewhere in the design, why not try to make it look as if it was handwritten?

This way the romantic mood and feeling will very much be incorporated in the video, seeing it is well thought that handwritten notes or letters are romantic. This in combination with the soft pastel color palette (for the text) and the sunset palette (for the background), will give a strong romantic and sweet nature.

So, I doubted between making the designs analog with paint or drawing, or for me to start learning Adobe Premiere Pro, and start animating it in there. I choose the latter, only because I knew the knowledge gained for this project will be off much use later on.

I started off with noting down all of the lyrics, and chopping them in parts for the different screens. I also experimented with the different colors that might work for a sunset, and a text color that looked romantic.

Now it was time to start the animation. I struggled a little bit in the beginning, seeing I didn't have any experience with Adobe Premiere Pro, but a lot of research and tutorials later, I got the hang of it quite fast. It was a long process, but I am really glad how the video turned out.