Blake Shelton "Happy Anywhere"
Author: Nicita Amy Botha
09/10/2020
Country music superstar Blake Shelton and a genre-bending lyric video? COUNT US IN! With our origami truck we embarked on an adventure through a paper world and created something truly unique and compelling.
"Happy Anywhere" is a song by American singer Blake Shelton that features guest vocals from his girlfriend, Gwen Stefani. ”Musically, "Happy Anywhere" is an upbeat country duet. The lyrics pertain to the couple's personal relationship and describe being able to find happiness anywhere.
Warner Music was looking for a truly unique lyric video. They did not want to include imagery of the artists and though it could have a ‘country feel’, they wanted to stay away form country cliches. The challenge was how to create something out-the-box but not too left of field that it conflicted the lyrics’ sentiment.
Animation is not often associated with country music and thus was a great way to begin to build this special idea. BUT! How would we keep it sophisticated? What would be the content?
We took to the drawing board and it was there that we stumbled across our inspiration.
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
- Romantic English poet, William Wordsworth
Let’s bring paper to life. “I could be happy anywhere with you,” the lyrics say. Well, then the paper is going to fold into forests and cities and the big blue sky. And to add that country feel, an old-school country truck.
After a successful pitch and catching up with the clients we refined the idea and began animation. The first step was to lock in the layout of the world, this began with Farm > City > Clouds > Forest, but was later refined to allow for a mixture of city and forest which created a bigger impact on the viewers sooner in the video.
IMAGES:
The original layout build
without lyrics, texture and lighting.
We then added the text into the world. This process went as smoothly as one could dream and was much due to the fact that we had locked down a wonderful layout.
From here came animation. After some testing it was clear that ‘less is more’ when animating the object to ‘fold’. We chose key elements to animate which added an exciting element to the video but still allowed for easy reading of the lyrics.
Lastly came texturing and lighting, adding those final touches that brought the sparkle. We provided high resolution stills for the clients to approve before we sent off the project to RebusFarm for export.
IMAGE TOP:
A still render of the small detailing;
birds, trees and paper tears.
IMAGE BOTTOM:
Text placement and lighting.
Ultimately we where able to create something special and unique. Something that resulted in happy clients and smiles all around.
