The Perfect Song
Spec/Student Project (2016)
After working as an editor for the last six years, I can confirm that most music library sites are absolutely terrible. These boards are for Premium Beat, which is a music library site that is decidedly not terrible. It's a thirty second spot called "The Perfect Song" and acts as an anthem to Premium Beat's service, but also to the power of music itself.
A short motion test.
Here's an animatic of the boards with the final audio track:
Just Press Play
The triangle is the key element in the spot. It acts as an arrow bringing us through the strengths of music, becomes a part of the typography, and connects us to experience of using Premium Beat by acting as the play button and playhead.
Branded
Premium Beat provided a brand guideline that provided a color palette, typography guidelines, and even some mood boards. This helped make a lot of decisions upfront.
Setting the Mood
Finding the right mood was tricky. The audio track for the spot is fast and upbeat, but Premium Beat has a cool, laid-back jazzy vibe going (and so did a lot of the footage and stills they provided). So the challenge became balancing the two. The movement of the animation is fast to keep up with pace of the audio, but I kept to simple shapes and restrained colors to evoke classic jazz album covers.
Exploration
Get ready for some crappy doodles and illegible handwriting. Yay!
The final look and design was really a combination of a lot of other ideas and false starts. Some ideas made it into the final piece is some shape or form, while others were (thankfully) never seen again.
After all this, I realized I was missing something to tie the whole piece together. There was no unifying element. Just a bunch of separate ideas and visuals that weren't necessarily bad, but also had no real reason for existing. So it was back to pen and paper.
And that's when I hit on the triangle to tie it all together:
After I had the triangle ( or, really the purpose behind the triangle) it was relatively smooth sailing from there.