When I started animating Spotify Canvases, I began garnering social media attention of small music artists and communities all over America. One of the artists I got to know through mutual Instagram friends was Grey Dugan, an indie pop artist attending USC Thornton’s School of Music. Smalltown Breakdown was one of Grey’s most recent releases at the time, and I was inspired by the youthful, grassroots level of production that the single exuded.

In this Canvas, I took on a lot of technical challenges in After Effects to capture the collage-y, multimedia effect that I felt reflected the idea of “garage band“ music. The idea was to put Grey and his collaborating artist into a minivan driving away from their small town. Many of the assets in this piece were digitally painted and animated in Procreate, such as the minivan, sun, moon, and waves. The beach sand and road stripes were masked images of stucco wall and forsythia flowers, respectively, which were edited into seamless columns so that the animation could run on an infinite loop.

When I sent the video to Grey, he was very excited with the creative avenue I took, both in conceptually and stylistically. You can find the full Canvas and Grey’s single on Spotify here.