Bitter Stranger

2018 | Animated Lyrics Video

With this project I wanted to capture the bittersweet nature of the lyrics, while playing up the energetic tone and quality of the music. The lemon motif is both a reference to their bitter taste, but also the “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade saying.”

I interpreted the persona singing the song to be the kind of person to push their luck with the person they fancy and growing bitter and vindictive as their advances go unappreciated. So while I express their interactions playfully, I made sure the recipient grew visibly more frustrated as the song continues.

(see process below)

Music Credits

“Spit on a Stranger” performed by Nickel Creek
Lyrics © BMG Rights Management US, LLC

Process Work

Storyboards

Starting off in storyboards I knew I wanted to contrast vocal styles in my type, settling on a “cut-out” style of block letters for the general staccato, a cursive script for elongated phrases, and a more traditional sans serif for the parts that are sung more quietly, with a more intense tone.

That last bit was later cut largely because it felt out of place with the rest of the visual language.

Lemons were one of those ideas I wasn’t sure was going to work, but felt really fit thematically and could add a lot of visual interest. Through critique it was decided that the lemons were a good idea, but needed to be used more judiciously especially before the mention of “bitter strangers.”

Animated Storyboards

I took my initial storyboards and roughly animated them to music to demonstrate aspects I had in mind that were hard to show through static images. Primarily how words would be broken up into syllables and the sliding transitions.

Animation: First Pass

I wanted to rough as much of the song out as I could before going back and adding little flourishes and fixing small timing issues. So you can see the start of the bouncy animation early on, as I gave my class a taste of what I wanted it to look like.

Major takeaways from this stage were that the latter half of the song was lacking and that the lemon people should be used more. I was very happy about adding more of the lemon people.

Animation: Second Pass

This is what was originally turned in. Most of it was okay, but time was an issue. Major changes I did like included making the background color a brighter teal color to better compliment the yellow, more lemon people, and generally just fixing most of the timing and animation issues.

Animation: Final

After I was able to step away for a couple of weeks, I was ready to set about fixing up this animation and getting it much closer to what I knew it could be.

Major changes at this stage included making the script lines a dark teal instead of black, helping avoid tension cause by overlapping with the dark gray lettering. I also added more of those lines making sure they interacted with the visual composition and audio.

I also scrapped the ending all together and tried again. The balloon no longer floats all across the scene so I could make the string animation much more believable and generally have better control over the scene.