M*rder Song by Aurora
Animation, 2021
Project Overview
As part of my university assignment, we were tasked with creating either a full-length song or a 1-minute animated music video. I chose to create a 1 minute animated video because I wanted to work with stop-motion frames. The song I selected was ‘Murder Song’ by the Norwegian artist Aurora. I worked on this project during the pandemic, and the song’s lyrics resonated with my emotions at the time.
The process commenced with sketching the storyboard and delving into the artist’s perspective to grasp the intended message behind her lyrics. Through constant Zoom calls with my tutor, we exchanged ideas and thoughts on how to interpret the lyrics and frames separately and how to combine these meanings without compromising the song’s tone and essence.
To make the mv less heavy but still maintain a mysterious tone, I decided to feature only two characters, represented by the colours blue and pink red. The act of murder, carried out by the blue character, serves as a metaphor for how love and protection is experienced by the pink character. In this context, the characters themselves are the only weapons.
Final Considerations
The project went through different variations (such as the video shared below) and although I initially started with stop-motion frames, the process of drawing each frame individually became too labour-intensive. Consequently, I opted to learn the basic motions of After Effects, allowing me to save time for finalizing the remaining aspects of the video. However, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the end result, as it’s evident that there’s a contrast between the rustic and smooth movements. Perhaps sticking with one style would have created a more cohesive visual style throughout the entire video.