Animation and music are two dynamic mediums that, when combined, create an immersive and emotionally resonant experience. Animated music videos offer unique advantages that other formats often cannot match:
Creative Freedom: Animation breaks the boundaries of reality, allowing brands to visualize abstract concepts, fantastical worlds, and imaginative scenarios that align perfectly with their messaging.
Emotional Engagement: Music has a universal ability to evoke emotions, while animation can visually depict narratives that amplify these feelings, creating a memorable and impactful experience.
Versatility: Animated music videos can cater to diverse audiences across various platforms, from social media and websites to television and streaming services.
They enable brands to craft stories that not only capture attention but also foster deep emotional connections with their audience.
Case Study: Reaching Younger Audiences
We recently made an animated music video for a brand that celebrates the achievements of women in every field from arts, dance, music to politics, business, and academia.
Objective: Strengthen its brand identity as a champion of women's contribution to society to a younger target audience—women in their teens and early adulthood.
Strategy: Create animated music videos featuring young girls who over come challenges to make a significant contribution to society. The main character in these videos should be based on historical women.
a. Concept Development
We started with concept development, where the brand’s core values and messaging are translated into a relatable and inspiring story.
For instance, the brand focused on empowerment and overcoming challenges, we had the central character navigating challenges, triumphing over various obstacles. .
b. Character Design and Animation
The character design is crucial in bringing the narrative to life. We studied the historical woman to get a good sense of their brand.
For the first video, we created a character in denim overalls, crusty brown boots and wavy ashburn hair. Her visual representation—through her clothing, dynamic movements, and expressive features—conveys her personality.
c. Musical Composition
Music sets the tone and adds emotional depth of the story. We made a powerful, uplifting soundtrack to underscore the protagonist’s journey, heightening moments of triumph and adding layers of emotion to the visual narrative.
We brought the animation and music together to create a cohesive and compelling storytelling experience.
Production Using AI
To pull together the animated music video, we used a whole bunch of AI tools from Midjourney to Suno, Kling, Runway ML, Stylar and many others. We even used Butterflies app to see if we could get a more consistent character output.
Quality Compromises
There were some compromises we had to make when it came to quality (e.g. colour grading). But overall, we felt the output was just at the right fidelity for the budgetted time.
Reducing Production Time
A film like this would have taken us, pre-AI, at least 2-3 months to conceive, produce and edit. With AI tools, we were able to cut down production time by 50%. Editing was still time-consuming as we had to bring together the outputs from different AI tools into one single timeline and look-and-feel.
New Time Investments
We spent quite a bit of time testing and trying the various AI tools. This was time-consuming as the tools were rapidly changing as we were producing the outputs which meant that a technique that worked the day before, could stop working altogether and we would have to reproduce all the assets using a new method to achieve quality standards.
There's a Subscription for That!
Every tool had a different subscription plan and before we knew it, we were subscribed to all sorts of plans. Often, we would run out of credits/tokens because we were testing all sorts of prompts and had to top up our plans.
AI Tools? Nah, more like teammates
AI tools turned out to be pretty much like human creatives - you have to invest the time to learn their strengths so you can brief/prompt them to produce work more aligned with the overall goal. They are like teammates with quarks and quirks all baked in. And they never give you the output exactly as you envision it.
The role of the producer is now to bring together both the humans-in-the-loop and the AI creatives to deliver a cohesive, whole output that achieves the project's objectives.
Overall, the process of making these music animations was much less time-consuming, and also a lot more fun. With AI tools rapidly advancing, these sort of creatives will become more commonplace in content strategies - especially for brands that aim to tug at the heart strings and make meaningful statements about life.