Background Research
With a song, we communicate feeling through sound, and with a lyric video, we communicate the same feeling through sight. To transfer this feeling from audition to vision, I started by listening to the song (on repeat!) and noting its message through the words and music. Some attributes that stood out to me were:
Clear, bouncy rhythms: There's baseline beats followed a repeatable pattern, which would make the movements springy and light.
Contrasting lyrics to music: The lyrics are moody and a little resentful, but the musical phrases sound more upbeat than the lyrics would suggest.
Constant movement: There's always some sort of movement, meaning I'd have to choose my pauses well to give a visual break.
Sketches as Storyboards
After getting a feeling of the song, I moved to storyboarding. Since animation on a screen takes time, I sketched on paper first to iterate through variations. My priority was readability, leading to some visual priorities:
Negative Space: Since the lyrics will be moving, I had to add more negative space to draw focus to the main words.
Type Attributes: Weight and capitalization on the glyphs also changed based on the position of the word to the baseline rhythm.
Motion: I planned for repeat motions when I heard repeat phrases.
Illustrator Pages as Storyboards
After sketching, I transferred my paper storyboards to digital storyboards. I aimed to capture the feeling from my background research:
Bouncing movements: Fast starts and slow ends meant I spent more time animating the beginning of a word's movement.
Color and typeface: I chose a sans serif typeface to reduce tiny tails that would move with the words. I chose a neon color scheme to reflect the pop culture background of the song.
Defining groups of words: I couldn't fit an entire sentence or musical phrase on one screen. To keep negative space around the words, I blocked each sentence into groups of words depending on the speed of the phrase.
Type as image: Animating letters didn't convey the feeling of movement well, so I moved to animating type as an image. This allowed me to break up characters and move them off of a uniform baseline.
Animating in After Effects
Now that I knew what the color theme and copy looked like on a screen, I started animating the lyrics.
I started with a couple of motions, to get a numerical sense of how long words would last on the screen. I realized that if I matched the speed of the song, the lyrics moved too fast. I had to convey change without making the copy change position.
I made some stylistic changes to accomplish this:
Uppercase and lowercase words on the same screen: Uppercase words took up more space, and didn't have to move as fast to grab attention.
Color changes on beat changes: Instead of moving copy as the phrase moved, I changed colors as the beat changed. This was a stronger visual cue than I had expected, so I applied them only after attempting a moving word.
Final Lyric Video
I kept animating until I had 20 seconds of the chorus. This captured the musical phrases and feeling of the entire chorus, and it could also be adapted to the verses with minimal effort. I would only need to change the words on the screen, but the style would remain the same.