For a motion project in school, I created an animation inspired by the lofi hip hop track “When You’re Near” by Elijah Who. The song reminds me of a warm spring day, so I designed the animation to capture that same calm, relaxed feeling through soft movement and warm visual tones.
Goals for this project included:
• Practicing hand-drawn animation
• Using animation guides to stay in time with the music
• Creating looped animation cycles that move naturally with the rhythm of the song
This project helped me explore how motion, rhythm, and illustration can work together to visually reflect the mood of a piece of music.
The animation guides helped estimate the timing of the movement, which was especially useful when trying to match the flowers blooming with the rhythm of the music.
I used the blooming flowers as a visual way to communicate the feeling of spring and the sense that plants are just beginning to emerge. This grounded the viewer in a familiar, natural moment before transitioning into a more surreal sequence where the flowers begin to bloom in the sky.
Animating the flower blooming and dissolving required a lot of pre-planning to figure out how the cycle would work. Once I completed one flower animation, I duplicated and layered the sequence so that as one cycle finished, another would begin. This allowed the animation to loop smoothly and maintain a continuous rhythm with the music.
