SAYWANAY

i'm gonna try to keep it chill today. this is a lo-fi music video, after all!

"starbrry city" was animated by five folks: domrom, roccaflock, saywanay, dynamotoon, and thatskidding. and they all did a real bang-up job here! the backgrounds and the colors are all really pretty, so they'll be the focus for this post because...i mean, look at them! pink! blue! yum!

and also they work great on a compositional level.

this is great timing too, 'cuz domrom actually posted some behind-the-scenes stuff on this music video the other day. so let's get to it!

one of the scenes i think work best is this wide shot here, in terms of composition and colors.

compositionally, this scene is set up really well! in both the storyboard and the final video, the driver is positioned near a third of the image. on top of that, she stays in the same position throughout the whole scene, so it doesn't feel too busy or confusing—which especially helps because of how busy the background already is.

it also helps that the highway she's on is completely horizontal. the buildings in the background create a lot of vertical lines in the scene, so the highway really stands out.

of course, composition isn't the only thing that makes this scene work. a lot of color goes into it, too:

one of the things i've learned about color, both from making personal art and art for school, is that variety in value helps a lot in communicating objects more clearly. this is especially useful if something doesn't have an outline, as is the case with the driver and her motorcycle.

one way to check for value variation is to turn down the saturation on everything so the image is in grayscale, and from there you can see if any of the values are blending in too much. admittedly, i think looking at this image now, i think there could be more value variation with the driver? but stuff like her hair and her hat still make her stand out.

i think the storyboard does a better job at having this value variation. the driver's and highway's darker values stand out great against the buildings' lighter values.

on the topic of color, i really like the color scheme here! i'm kinda biased, since i really like neon lights, and pink and blue are my favorite colors anyways.

i actually can't think of a reason why this color scheme works, at least for me. i know a lot of other stuff i like that uses a similar color scheme, but i don't want to compare this to other works.

i think the cooler, darker hues of the blues and greens contrasted with the warmer pinks and the lighter values of the windows and screens is what i like most?

also, if you look at the colors with the darkest values, you can see that they're not completely saturated. there's a bit of a blue-ish, purple-ish tint to them that i personally really like.

in any case, i love this music video's visuals. i'm working on a lot of city settings in my own projects, so analyzing stuff like this is really helping a lot!